Arthur Rimbaud

(1854 -- 1891)

  Had he set out deliberately to make his life a source of myth, Arthur Rimbaud could hardly have done better. Born in the small city of Charleville in northern France to an army officer who left when Arthur was 6, and raised by a stern, demanding, possessive mother, Rimbaud was until his 15th year a precocious, well-behaved, religious child, a model student.

   Encouraged by a local teacher in his attempts to write, he early in 1870 published his first poem, and then in July of that year ran away, heading for Paris. He was arrested for not having a train ticket and was forced to return home, but this episode marked the end of his formal education and the beginning of his short but meteor-like career as a poet. Within a year he had run away two more times, had changed into a bitter, arrogant, disheveled, foul-talking adolescent, and had written some of the poems that would one day place him among the greatest names of modern poetry. Fueled in part by books on alchemy and occultism from the local library, this strange and solitary boy genius began to conceive of himself as a kind of seer, a saint of poetry, and in two letters, now called the "Lettres du Voyant," he worked out his now-famous scheme whereby the artist must cultivate the "derangement of all the senses."

  When he was 16. Rimbaud returned to Paris, began an affair with Paul Verlaine, a married poet ten years his senior, and in about six months managed to scandalize and offend virtually everyone in the literary establishment. Verlaine and Rimbaud traveled together, lived for a while in London, but the relationship was extremely chaotic and in the summer of 1873, when they were in Belgium, Verlaine in a state of drunken frenzy shot Rimbaud in the hand and was jailed.

  Rimbaud went back to the family farm and wrote one of his masterpieces, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). By 1875, when he was 21, Rimbaud was through with literature.

  Always a traveler and a lover of languages, he began making his way eastward, shipping to Java, working as a quarry foreman in Cyprus, finally settling in East Africa, where he spent the next twelve years as a trader and gun runner.

  His ambition, as best one can tell from his letters home, was to get rich, but in this he failed. A leg tumor in 1891 caused him to return to France for medical treatment and he died of cancer at 37 in a Marseilles hospital, apparently indifferent to the fame his poetry had by then acquired in Paris.

  His sister, who was with him at the end, claimed that in his last days he again accepted the Catholic faith of his childhood.