French poet of the symbolist
school. He was born and educated in Charleville, Ardennes Department.
He exhibited great intellectual precocity and wrote verse at the age of
ten. When he was 17, he composed the strikingly original poem, The Drunken
Boat (1871; trans. 1941), which he submitted to the older poet
Paul Verlaine.
This work, which set the tone of the entire symbolist, or decadent, movement,
so impressed Verlaine that he entreated the author to move to Paris. Later,
accompanied by Verlaine, he went to England and then to Belgium. In Belgium,
Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud had a stormy relationship, tried twice to
take the life of the younger poet, wounding him seriously in the second
attempt. Rimbaud wrote an allegorical account of the matter in A Season
in Hell (1873; trans. 1932).
In 1880 Rimbaud became a trader in North Africa, with headquarters at
Harer and Shoa, central Abyssinia. Verlaine, under the impression that
Rimbaud was no longer alive, published the latter's poems in Illuminations
(1886; trans. 1932). This work contains the famous Sonnet des voyelles
(Sonnet of the Vowels), in which each of the five vowels is associated
with a different color. In 1891 Rimbaud returned to France for medical
treatment of a tumor on his knee; he died in a hospital at Marseille.
On the strength of a few poems that he wrote between the ages of 10 and
20, Rimbaud ranks as one of the most original of all French poets. |