Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud born 20 October 1854 (d. 1891)

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet, born in Charleville.

Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville in the Ardennes in north-eastern France. As a boy he was a restless but brilliant student. By the age of fifteen he had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in Latin.

In 1870 his teacher Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's first literary mentor and his original verses in French began to improve rapidly. He frequently ran away from home and may have briefly joined the Paris Commune of 1871. At 19, he ran away from the literary world for a stint abroad as coffee merchant and part-time gun-runner. He may have been raped by drunken Communard soldiers (his poem Le cœur supplicié [The Tortured Heart] suggests so). By then he had become an anarchist, started drinking and amused himself by shocking the local bourgeoisie with his shabby dress and long hair. At the same time he wrote to Izambard and Paul Démeny about his method for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a 'long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses'.

He returned to Paris in late September 1871 at the invitation of the eminent Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (after Rimbaud had sent him a letter containing several samples of his work) and resided briefly in Verlaine's home. Verlaine, who was married, promptly fell in love with the sullen, blue-eyed, light-brown-haired young man. They became lovers and led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish. They scandalised the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behaviour of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly visionary verse.

Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy love affair took them to London in 1872, Verlaine abandoning his wife and infant son (both of whom he had abused in his alcoholic rages.)

In July 1873, Rimbaud committed himself to journey to Paris with or without Verlaine. In a drunken rage, Verlaine shot at him, one of the two shots striking the 19-year-old in the left wrist. Rimbaud considered the wound superficial and at first did not have Verlaine charged. After this, Verlaine and his mother accompanied Rimbaud to a Brussels train station where Verlaine 'behaved as if he were insane'. This made Rimbaud 'fear that he might give himself over to new excesses', so he turned and ran away. In his words, 'it was then I (Rimbaud) asked a police officer to arrest him [Verlaine].' Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating medico-legal examination, including his intimate correspondence with his lover and the accusations of Verlaine's wife about the nature of their relationship.

Rimbaud eventually withdrew the complaint, but the judge sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison. Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing and a description of that 'drôle de ménage' (odd partnership) life with Verlaine, his 'pitoyable frère' (pitiful brother) and 'vierge folle' ('mad virgin') to whom he was 'l'époux infernal' (the infernal husband). In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germain Nouveau and put together his pathbreaking Les illuminations, including the first-ever two French poems in free verse.

Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875, in Stuttgart, Germany, after Verlaine's release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By then Rimbaud had given up writing and decided on a steady, working life; some speculate he was fed up with his former wild living, while others suggest he sought to become rich and independent to afford living one day as a carefree poet and man of letters. He continued to travel extensively in Europe, mostly on foot. In the summer of 1876 he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Army to travel free of charge to Java (Indonesia) where he promptly deserted, returning to France by ship.

He travelled to Cyprus and in 1880 finally settled in Aden. He had several native women as lovers and for a while he lived with an Ethiopian mistress. Whether he had other types of love-interests has not, apparently, come down to us. In 1884 he quit his job and became a merchant on his own in Harare, Ethiopia. He made a small fortune as a gun-runner. Rimbaud developed right knee synovitis which degenerated into a carcinoma and the state of his health forced him to return to France on May 9, 1891, where his leg was amputated on May 27. Rimbaud died in Marseilles on November 10, 1891, at age 37.

His influence in modern literature, music and art has been pervasive.