Arthur Rimbaud

French poet (1854-1891)

Fame78.8
Momentum3.5
France rank#61

Source-basedFalling

Fame78.8
Momentum3.5
France rank#61
Writers rank#114
Wikipedia99.6K

Lived 1854–1891, aged 37France

France WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
106 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in France
#61
Writers
Era
1854–1891
Aged 37
Known for
The Michael Nyman Song…
1992

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He wrote poems that cracked open the future of literature, then walked away at twenty and never looked back. Rimbaud spent more years as a gunrunner and merchant in Africa than he ever did as a poet, but the work he left behind—surreal, transgressive, impossible—made him a ghost every modernist still chases.

Biography

About

Born in Charleville in 1854, Rimbaud excelled as a student and started writing young, then ditched formal education in his teens to run toward Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. In his late adolescence he produced nearly all his literary output—including A Season in Hell and Illuminations—while locked in a hectic, sometimes violent two-year romance with the poet Paul Verlaine. At twenty he assembled Illuminations and stopped writing literature entirely. He spent the next seventeen years travelling three continents as a merchant and explorer, a restless libertine turned trader, until cancer…

Voice