Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, north-eastern France, in 1854, the second of four children. His mother came from a local farming family. His father, and army officer, abandoned the family exceptionally successful. From a very early age he was writing poems, initially in Latin. By his teenage years he has outgrown his restricted life in provincial Charleville and had run away on a number of occasions, to Paris and to Belgium. In 1871 he formed a liaison with Verlaine. The two young poets soon fled Paris, living for many months in London. During all of this period Rimbaud was writing poetry. In 1873 Verlaine shot and wounded him, and their relationship ended. Rimbaud then spent some weeks writing the only work he saw through to publication, A Season in Hell, an account in prose and verse of his hopes for a new poetry, and their defeat. He completed the prose poems of Illuminations, begun before A Season. In 1875, however, aged 21, Rumbaud abandoned poetry altogether in disillusioned disgust and turned his back on everything in his former life. His remaining sixteen years were spent mainly out of France, the last years mostly in the Horn of Africa, where he worked as a trader, A tumour on his right knee forced his back to France, where the lag was immediately amputated. Still planning to return to Africa, he died of cancer in Marseilles in 1891 at the age of 37. The first edition of Rimbaud's complete poems appeared in 1895; all his known work was published in 1898, edited by his brother-in-law.

Martin Sorrell is Reader in French and Translation Studies at the University of Exeter.