Rimbaud quit literature before most poets begin
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) packed nearly all his poetry into his late teens, assembled his last major work, Illuminations, and stopped writing literature at twenty. He spent the rest of his short life trading and exploring across three continents, and died of cancer just after turning thirty-seven.
Rimbaud was born in Charleville in the Ardennes on 20 October 1854. His father, an infantry captain decorated for service in Algeria, lived with the family for under three months in total and stopped visiting altogether after 1860. His mother, whom Arthur privately called Mouth of Darkness, drove her sons hard, punishing mistakes with a hundred lines of Latin verse and skipped meals, and walked them home from school into their teens. At nine he wrote a 700-word protest against learning Latin.
He was still a brilliant pupil, winning eight first prizes in French academic competitions in 1869 and seven the next year. His first published poem appeared in January 1870, when he was fifteen, and a young teacher, Georges Izambard, became his mentor. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he ran off to Paris without a ticket, was jailed for fare-dodging, and was bailed out by Izambard; on later escapes he left fifteen and then seven poems with the Douai poet Paul Demeny, including Le Dormeur du val.
In May 1871 he wrote his letters of the seer, arguing that a poet must reach vision through a long, deliberate derangement of all the senses. Paul Verlaine, sent some of his poems, replied with a one-way ticket to Paris, and the sixteen-year-old arrived in September 1871. Their stormy, sometimes violent affair lasted nearly two years. Whether Rimbaud fought for the Paris Commune is uncertain, though poems from that time show sympathy for it.
His A Season in Hell is read as a forerunner of modernism, and his dreamlike, transgressive themes anticipated surrealism. After abandoning literature he worked as a merchant and explorer abroad until his death on 10 November 1891.
Source: Arthur Rimbaud
