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. But in July 1870, restless and despondent over the loss of his favorite teacher (who'd left to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, and died), the boy turned rebel and ran away from home, heading for Paris. Here he had his initiation into all-male sex at the hands of a group of Communard soldiers. 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.

Broke, Rimbaud lived on the city streets. Immersed in his rebellion, he denounced women and the church. He lived willingly in squalid conditions, studying "immoral" poets (such as Baudelaire) and reading voraciously everything. Fueled in part by books on alchemy and occultism, as well as philosophy, 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".

His own poetic philosophy began to take shape at this time. To Rimbaud, the poet was a seer. His job was to jar and jangle the senses. A precursor to surrealism, Rimbaud, the precocious boy-poet of French symbolism, wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 19th century. His highly suggestive, subtle work drew on subconscious sources, and its form was correspondingly supple and novel. Rimbaud has been identified as one of the creators of free verse because of the rhythmic experiments in his prose poems Illuminations (1886). His Sonnet of the Vowels (1871), in which each vowel is assigned a color, helped popularize synesthesia (the description of one sense experience in terms of another), a device widely exploited by the symbolists. The hallucinatory images in The Drunken Boat (1871) and Rimbaud's urging, in Letter from the Seer (1871), that poets become seers by undergoing a complete derangement of the senses also reveal Rimbaud as a precursor of surrealism. Following his own dictum, Rimbaud lived an inordinately intense, tortured existence that he described in A Season in Hell (1873).

Almost a year of vagabondage followed. As he was a very handsome a teenager, he lived off wealthy men who picked him up. When he was 16 Rimbaud returned to Paris. He had sent some of his poems to Paul Verlaine - a married poet ten years his senior - , the older poet was dazzled, and in 1871 paid Rimbaud's way to Paris. Rimbaud moved into Verlaine's household and they became lovers - in about six months managed to scandalize and offend virtually everyone in the literary establishment. Rimbaud's drug taking and generally unclean living eventually alienated everyone except Verlaine. In 1872, Verlaine left his wife. They travelled together, lived for a while in London.

Their relationship was extremely chaotic and continued sporadically over two years and was a source of the great spiritual disillusionment that formed the core of A Season in Hell. It was during this time that Rimbaud wrote The Spiritual Hunt, a poem that Verlaine called his masterpiece. The manuscript vanished during the pair's chaotic travels. By 1873, Rimbaud was disenchanted by his relationship with Verlaine and decided to leave him. During a drunken argument in Brussels, Verlaine shot at Rimbaud, hitting him once in the wrist. Rimbaud was tired of their downward spiral and called in the police. Verlaine was sent to prison for 18 months. Rimbaud, feeling both guilty and exhilarated, went back to the family farm and wrote one of his masterpieces, Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell).

...As for me, I am intact, and I don't care.

Now, only recently, being on the point of giving my last squawk, Ithought of looking for the key to the ancient feast where I might find my appetite again.

Charity is that key. -- This inspiration proves that I have dreamed!

"You will always be a hyena..." etc., protests the devil who crowned me with such pleasant poppies. "Attain death with all your appetites, your selfishness and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I'm fed up: -- But, dear Satan, a less fiery eye I beg you! And while awaiting a few small infamies in arrears, you who love the absence of the instructive or descriptive faculty in a writer, for you let me tear out these few, hideous pages from my notebook of one of the damned.

(from A Season in Hell)

Soon after the affair ended, Rimbaud abandoned his writing. He had not yet attained the age of 20. By 1875, when he was 21, Rimbaud was through with literature. He became a mercenary in Java and deserted his dutch regiment and spent a couple of weeks in tropical jungle before getting back to France incognito on a commerical vessel. He then got a job in the Loisset Circus in Stockholm. Still he was restless. He walked from his native region of Roche across the Swiss Alps and to Genoa where he caught a ship to Alexandria. From then on his movements are sketchy. Cyprus where he became a quarry foreman, Suez, and down the canal to Aden. Then inland into Harare, in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia).

He became a gun-runner, trader and to aid in his travel an islamic holy man who discussed the Koran. He made every effort to blend into his surroundings - picking up the languages of the 3 native tribes in the Shoa/Harare region. His ambition, as best one can tell from his letters home, was to get rich, but in this he failed. While he was in North Africa, Verlaine, believing him dead, published Rimbaud's poems in Illuminations (1886). This work contains the famous Sonnet of the Vowels. His popularity in France was growing, but he refused offers to go back, and referred to the poems he wrote in his youth as "slop".

Ill with syphilis, he returned to Marseilles in June of 1891. His cancerous right leg was amputated, probably due to a complications of syphilis, and he was nursed for a time by his tender sister Isabelle, intil 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.

Had he set out deliberately to make his life a source of myth, Arthur Rimbaud could hardly have done better. His literary style has influenced almost all modern forms of literature, including the Beats. He has been cited as an inspiration by songwriters like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan. Patti Smith has often referred to him in her poetry and songs.