Arthur Rimbaud

The boy from Charleville

Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, a garrison town in the Ardennes near the Belgian border. His father was a junior army officer who left the family for good; his mother, from farming stock, raised four children alone and hard. At school he was a prodigy of the old-fashioned kind, sweeping the prizes for Latin verse, and at fifteen he began writing poems in French that his teacher, Georges Izambard, was clear-eyed enough to encourage against the wishes of everyone else. Charleville itself he found unbearable, and from the age of fifteen he kept running away from it.

The first escape, in August 1870, ended badly: he took the train to Paris without a ticket, was arrested on arrival at the Gare du Nord — the great northern railway station where trains from the Ardennes come in — and was held at Mazas, the Paris prison used for men awaiting trial, until Izambard paid for him and took him home. He ran again through 1871, on foot and by rail, each time returning to a mother who did not want a poet in the house. The poems of these vagrant months are among the ones French schoolchildren still learn: "Les Effarés" ("The Dazed Ones"), about hungry children watching bread being baked, and "Le Dormeur du val" ("The Sleeper in the Valley"), about a young soldier lying in the grass, who turns out on the last line to be dead.

The derangement of the senses, explained plainly

In May 1871, aged sixteen, Rimbaud wrote two letters that set out what he thought poetry was for. To Izambard on 13 May he wrote: "C'est faux de dire : Je pense. On devrait dire : On me pense" — "It is false to say: I think. One should say: I am thought." Two days later, to another poet, Paul Demeny, he sent the letter that became known as the lettre du voyant — the "seer's letter". The poet, he argued, must make himself a seer, and gets there by what he called "un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens": a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses.

a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses

un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens

The phrase has been misread for a century and a half as a licence to get wrecked, and Rimbaud did drink and take hashish. But the sentence says something more deliberate. The middle word is raisonné — reasoned, systematic. He meant that a poet should attack his own ordinary habits of seeing, on purpose and methodically, until the senses stop reporting the usual world and start reporting something else, and that the poet then writes down what comes back. What came back, in his case, was a new kind of French: hallucinated, image-crammed, faster than the syntax of the day, and often abandoning rhyme and metre altogether. "J'écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l'inexprimable" — "I wrote silences, nights; I set down the inexpressible."

Summoned to Paris, September 1871

That summer he posted a batch of his poems to Paul Verlaine, then twenty-seven, newly married and already a name in Paris poetry. Verlaine's reply was an invitation to come and stay. Rimbaud arrived in Paris in September 1871, not yet seventeen, carrying the manuscript of "Le Bateau ivre" — a hundred lines spoken by a boat that has lost its crew and its steering and goes where the sea takes it, written by a boy who had never seen the sea. He read it aloud to the Vilains Bonshommes ("Ugly Fellows"), the monthly dinner club of Paris poets that Verlaine brought him to, and the room understood immediately that the provincial teenager was better than they were.

He then set about making himself impossible. He was filthy on principle, drank the table's absinthe, insulted the older poets, and at one dinner slashed a guest with a swordstick; the Vilains Bonshommes expelled him. He was also, briefly, a member of the Zutistes — roughly "the Damn-It-Alls", from zut, the mild French curse — a joke-name circle of young poets whose album of obscene parodies he filled with contributions. His Paris career lasted months, not years, and he never held an address of his own here: he lodged with Verlaine's in-laws until they threw him out, then in whatever room friends paid for. The most famous portrait of that moment is the painter Henri Fantin-Latour's group canvas Un coin de table ("A Corner of the Table", 1872), now in the Musée d'Orsay, the Paris museum of nineteenth-century art, where Rimbaud sits beside Verlaine at the end of a table of respectable literary men, the youngest person in the picture by a decade.

Verlaine, London, and the shot in Brussels

By 1872 Rimbaud and Verlaine were lovers, and Verlaine had left his wife Mathilde and their infant son to travel with him. The two spent about two years moving between Paris, Brussels and London, mostly broke, teaching a little French, quarrelling violently and writing some of the best work either of them produced. Verlaine's Romances sans paroles ("Songs Without Words") comes out of those months; so do most of the prose poems — pieces written as paragraphs rather than in lines of verse — that Rimbaud later gathered as Illuminations.

It ended on 10 July 1873 in a Brussels hotel room. Verlaine, drunk and frantic that Rimbaud was leaving him, bought a revolver and fired two shots at him, wounding him in the wrist. Rimbaud was bandaged at hospital and set off for the station; when Verlaine followed him through the street with his hand in his pocket, Rimbaud appealed to a policeman. Verlaine was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years in the Belgian prison at Mons. Rimbaud, eighteen, went back to his mother's farm at Roche in the Ardennes and finished the book he had been writing.

A Season in Hell, and the silence

Une saison en enfer ("A Season in Hell", 1873) is a short, furious book of prose broken by verse — the account of a man taking apart his own project, including the seer's programme of the 1871 letters, and finding it a lie he told himself. It is the only work Rimbaud ever put into print himself, at a Brussels printer's, on credit. He collected a few author's copies, and the rest of the edition stayed in the printer's basement, unclaimed and unpaid for, until it was rediscovered in 1901. The book that announced the end of his career was, in the most literal sense, never published in his lifetime.

Then he stopped. There were a few more prose poems, and travel with the poet Germain Nouveau in London in 1874, but by about 1875 — aged twenty — Rimbaud had given up literature and did not go back to it. He never explained why, and no letter survives in which he mourns it; when old friends wrote to him about his growing fame he answered about money and mules. The prose poems he had left behind were published in Paris in 1886 as Illuminations, in the short-lived literary review La Vogue, by editors who were not entirely sure whether the author was still alive.

Aden, Harar, and the leg

The second life is as documented as the first and much duller in the telling, which is part of its power. He learned German in Stuttgart, crossed the Alps on foot, enlisted in the Dutch colonial army in 1876 for the passage to Java, in the Dutch East Indies that are now Indonesia, and deserted within weeks, worked in Cyprus as a quarry foreman, and from 7 August 1880 was in Aden, the British-run port at the mouth of the Red Sea, buying coffee and hides for a French trading house. From 1881 he was based at Harar, in what is now eastern Ethiopia — one of the few Europeans there — running caravans inland, trading coffee, and in 1887 selling a consignment of rifles to Menelik II, the king who would soon rule all Ethiopia. The gun deal lost money.

In early 1891 a tumour grew in his right knee. He had himself carried on a stretcher for twelve days to the coast, sailed to Marseille, and on arrival in May had the leg amputated. He convalesced at the family farm, could not settle, and returned to the Hôpital de la Conception, a hospital in Marseille, where he died on 10 November 1891, aged thirty-seven, his sister Isabelle beside him. In Paris, the poems he had abandoned sixteen years earlier were by then being read as the beginning of modern French poetry, and the young men in the cafés of the Latin Quarter — the student and publishing district on the Left Bank of the Seine — spoke of him as a legend rather than a man with an address in Ethiopia.