Biography
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) is the supreme child genius in the history of poetry. Born in Charleville, France, he attended school there, then left for Paris where he embarked on a disastrous but enormously productive erotic relationship with another great poet, Paul Verlaine. When that affair wrecked itself spectacularly—with Verlaine sent to prison for shooting Rimbaud—Rimbaud apparently abandoned poetry, left Europe, eventually lived in east Africa for some ten years, and returned to France to die of cancer at the age of thirty-seven, a virtually unknown man. Once buried, though, he gradually dawned as the blazing comet of early Modernist verse.
