Arthur Rimbaud

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 killed him just after his thirty-seventh birthday in 1891. The poems he abandoned became a cornerstone of symbolism and a prefiguring jolt to surrealism, the work of someone who torched the template and left before anyone could ask him to explain.