Restless soul, having engaged in an at times violent romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine.

Poet must be a seer - reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men.—For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul—which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them!

Arthur Rimbaud  was a French poet who  influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism in his short but active life. He started writing poems while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21! He was most creative in his late-teens (17–20). His genius, both in its early flowering and its sudden extinction is a sadly astonishing phenomenon.Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854 at Charleville in provincial France. When he was 6 years old his family was abandoned by their father, an army captain, and forced into poverty. Rimbaud liked to play with the neighbourhood children, which horrified his mother and she somehow found the means to move them to the better part of town. Not having many playmates there, he concentrated on his studies, yearning to learn more and became a gifted student.   In 1870, restless and despondent over the loss of his favorite teacher (who`d left to fight in the Franco-Prussian War), Rimbaud ran away from home. He ran away more than once before finally making it to Paris. 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 from occult to philosophy.

His own poetic philosophy began to take shape at this time. Rimbaud is also considered to have been one of the creators of the free verse style 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.  

In 1871 Rimbaud met Verlaine and the two had a relationship, which was almost the undoing of Verlaine. Rimbaud`s drug taking and generally unclean living eventually alienated everyone except Verlaine. It was during this time that Rimbaud wrote The Spiritual Hunt, a poem that Verlaine called his masterpiece but that manuscript vanished during the pair`s travels. 

In 1872, Verlaine left his wife. He and Rimbaud moved to London. But the relationship started unravelling by 1873, in a drunken arguement Verlaine shot Rimbaud and , Rimbaud called the police. Verlaine was sentenced to prison for 18 months and Rimbaud full of guilt completed A Season in Hell in which he describes his inordinately intense, tortured existence.

Rimbaud gave up writing before he turned twenty. He wandered Europe before eventually becoming a trader and gunrunner in Ethiopia. Eighteen years later he returned to Marseilles in June of 1891. He died in Marseille, on Nov. 10, 1891 following the amputation of his cancerous right leg .

Rimbauds literary style has influenced almost all modern forms of literature. He has been cited as an inspiration by songwriters like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan.

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