Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (1854 to 1891) was a French poet known for transgressive and surreal themes and for an influence on modern literature and the arts that is said to prefigure surrealism. Born in Charleville, he began writing very young and excelled as a student, but abandoned formal education in his teens and ran away to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. He produced the bulk of his work in late adolescence and early adulthood, and stopped writing literature altogether at about age twenty, after assembling his last major work, Illuminations. He had a turbulent, sometimes violent relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine that lasted nearly two years. After he gave up writing he travelled on three continents as a merchant and explorer, and died of cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday. He is remembered for his contributions to symbolism and for A Season in Hell, a precursor of modernist literature.