Arthur Rimbaud Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France. His father, Frederic Rimbaud, was an army captain often away on service, and his mother, Vitalie Cuif, imposed strict discipline at home. This asymmetry shaped a childhood marked by intellectual precocity and a tense domestic atmosphere. Rimbaud excelled at the Collège de Charleville, developing facility in Latin and French verse. A young schoolfriend, Ernest Delahaye, preserved early drafts and memories of the prodigy. A decisive figure was his teacher Georges Izambard, who encouraged him to read widely beyond the curriculum and to write with daring. Before he was seventeen, Rimbaud had already composed striking poems that combined rural Ardennes imagery with unsettling perspective, including pieces later known such as Le Dormeur du val.

First Writings and the "Seer" Program
In 1870 and 1871, Rimbaud set out his radical poetics in letters that became famous as the Lettres du voyant. Addressed to Georges Izambard and to the poet Paul Demeny, these letters announced his vocation to make himself a "seer" through a systematic derangement of all the senses. The dictum "Je est un autre" crystallized his idea that the speaking self in poetry should be an instrument for voices larger than the individual. He sent poems and appeals to established writers, including Théophile de Banville, seeking entry into Parisian literary circles. In this feverish period he wrote Le Bateau ivre, a visionary torrent of images and music that epitomized his break with conventional rhetoric and the parnassian ideal of impersonal craft.

Paris, Verlaine, and London
In 1871 Rimbaud was invited to Paris by Paul Verlaine, a rising poet associated with the Parnassians. Their meeting sparked one of the most intense and turbulent relationships in literary history. Amid the lingering shock of the Franco-Prussian War and the aftermath of the Paris Commune, they haunted cafes and salons, testing the patience of older writers while drawing the curiosity of younger ones. Verlaine brought Rimbaud into his circle and into his home, straining his marriage to Mathilde. The pair decamped to London in 1872, exploring working-class neighborhoods and reading in British libraries, while Rimbaud wrote or reshaped prose-poems that would later be grouped as Les Illuminations. Their companionship, combustible and creative, oscillated between exaltation and violence. In July 1873 in Brussels, after days of recrimination, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was imprisoned, a scandal that reverberated through the press and the literary world.

Une Saison en Enfer and the Turning Point
That same year, in a burst of lucidity and bitterness, Rimbaud assembled Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), a hybrid of prose and verse that reads like an auto-da-fé of his youth. He arranged and paid for its printing in Brussels, but distributed only a handful of copies. The book recounts, through masks and allegories, the ruin of a visionary project and the record of a love affair that has become a trial. Its sections move between confession, invective, and metaphysical comedy, closing with a stark farewell. Although Les Illuminations would not appear in print until 1886, thanks in part to Verlaine's advocacy, Rimbaud's essential poetic oeuvre was complete before he turned twenty.

Abandoning Poetry and Continental Wanderings
After 1874, Rimbaud's literary production ceased. He lived for a time in London with the poet Germain Nouveau, then drifted through Belgium and Germany, taking odd jobs and studying languages. A brief reunion with Verlaine on the continent in 1875 marked a final coda to their collaboration. Restless and indifferent to literary reputation, he pursued physical challenges and travel. In 1876 he enlisted in the Dutch colonial army, sailed to the Indonesian archipelago, promptly deserted, and made his way back to Europe by ship. He resurfaced in Italy and in the eastern Mediterranean, working as a laborer and foreman, always on the move. His sister Isabelle Rimbaud and his mother followed his trajectories through letters that alternated between concern and pride.

Africa and the Life of a Trader
By the late 1870s Rimbaud had reached Aden, in present-day Yemen, entering the service of a trading house associated with Alfred Bardey. Soon he was posted to Harar, in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia. Over the next decade he became a seasoned caravan agent and merchant, dealing in commodities such as coffee, hides, and ivory, and at times in arms during regional conflicts. The former enfant terrible of French verse remade himself as a pragmatic negotiator and explorer of routes across the Horn of Africa. His letters from Aden and Harar, addressed mainly to his family and to a few old acquaintances like Ernest Delahaye, are remarkable documents of observation: they record prices, distances, climates, and people, as well as his ailments and occasional homesickness. He learned to communicate in the languages used in the region and produced practical notes about geography and local customs. The rigor once devoted to poetry was redirected to logistics and survival.

Final Illness and Death
In 1891, after months of escalating pain in his right leg while in Harar, Rimbaud undertook a difficult journey back to France. Doctors in Marseille diagnosed an aggressive tumor; his leg was amputated. Isabelle Rimbaud hurried to his bedside and remained with him through his last months, conveying news to their mother in Charleville. Despite brief hopes of convalescence and dreams of returning to the East, his condition worsened. Arthur Rimbaud died in Marseille on 10 November 1891, aged thirty-seven, and was buried in Charleville, the town where his prodigious career had begun.

Legacy and Influence
Rimbaud's renunciation of poetry did not prevent his ascension as a central figure of modern literature. Paul Verlaine had already placed him among the poètes maudits in a landmark 1884 study, framing his teenage works as both scandal and revelation. When Les Illuminations finally appeared in 1886, younger writers found in its lucid hallucinations a template for symbolist and, later, surrealist experiment. His compact oeuvre, spanning The Drunken Boat, the voyant letters, A Season in Hell, and the Illuminations, transformed ideas of authorship, voice, and perception. Etienne Carjat's photographs fixed the image of a fierce, unsmiling adolescent whose words had outpaced his era. Generations from Paul Claudel to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century traced lines back to him. The paradox endures: a poet who wrote his masterpieces as a minor, broke with literature before adulthood, and then lived anonymously across continents, yet left a body of work that continues to unsettle and animate readers around the world.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Arthur, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Meaning of Life - Deep - Parenting - Poetry.

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