Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud had written his most famous single poem, 'Le bateau ivre' ('The drunken boat') by the time he was 17. His writing life lasted about five years, yet it had an enormous influence not only on the writers of succeeding generations, but also on painters and musicians. A rebellious adolescent, he sent a poem to  Paul Verlaine who invited him to Paris on the strength of it. The intense and tortured relationship of the two poets, which included a spell living in poverty in London, ended after two years, in Brussels, with Verlaine imprisoned for shooting Rimbaud.

Rimbaud returned home, and finished writing his prose poem Une Saison en Enfer ('A Season in Hell') and composed Les Illuminations, both pioneering Symbolist works. He met Verlaine for the last time in 1875, by which time he had stopped writing. He travelled widely, settling in north Africa for some years before he died of cancer, shortly after his 37th birthday. The French poet Paul Valéry declared that 'all known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud's'.