Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen
Born	(1854-10-20)October 20, 1854 Charleville, France
Died	November 10, 1891(1891-11-10) (aged 37) Marseille, France
Occupation	Poet
Language	French
Nationality	French

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. His family name is pronounced a little like "ram-BOH". He was born in Charleville, a small town in north-eastern France, and died in Marseille soon after his 37th birthday.

Rimbaud is one of the most famous poets in the French language. He is especially famous because he wrote most of his poetry when he was very young, between the ages of about 15 and 20. Then he stopped writing poetry completely. He never clearly explained why. For the rest of his short life, he travelled in many countries. He was a soldier for a few weeks, then a worker, and later a trader, a person who buys and sells things. He lived and worked in Aden, in Arabia, and in Ethiopia. He died of cancer, a serious illness, in a hospital in Marseille.

His best-known works are the poem "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat", 1871), the short book Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), and Illuminations, a collection of prose poems. Prose poems are poems written like ordinary sentences, without lines of verse. Illuminations was probably written between about 1872 and 1875, and was first printed in 1886. Rimbaud is also remembered for his difficult relationship with the older poet Paul Verlaine. Their relationship ended in 1873, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist with a gun in Brussels.

Many writers and critics say that Rimbaud changed poetry. He said that a poet must become a "seer", a person who can see things that other people cannot see. He wrote some of the first free verse in French. Free verse is poetry without a fixed metre or rhyme. Later poets and artists, such as the symbolists and the surrealists, saw him as a model. Many singers, including Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, have also said that he inspired them.

Life

Family and childhood

Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes, near the border with Belgium. He was born at six o'clock in the morning, at number 12 in a street then called rue Napoléon.

His father, Frédéric Rimbaud (1814–1878), was a captain, or officer, in the French army. He had spent many years in Algeria and could speak Arabic. His mother, Vitalie Cuif (1825–1907), came from a farming family. The family farm was in Roche, a very small village about fifty kilometres from Charleville.

Arthur was the second child in the family. His brother Frédéric was born in 1853, one year before him. A baby sister was born in 1857, but she died after only a few weeks. Two other sisters were born later: Vitalie, in 1858, and Isabelle, in 1860.

Their father was almost never at home, because the army often sent him to different towns. In 1860, he was sent to another army post, and from that time Arthur's parents lived apart. In 1864, Frédéric Rimbaud left the army and went to live alone in Dijon. His children never saw him again.

Madame Rimbaud then raised her four children alone. She was hard-working, very religious, strict, and proud. She called herself "the widow Rimbaud", although her husband was still alive. Arthur both loved and feared her. All his life, he wrote letters to her; and all his life, he also tried to get away from her.

A brilliant student

Arthur Rimbaud and his brother Frédéric at the time of their first communion (1866).

In 1861, Arthur and his brother began school at the Rossat institute in Charleville. In 1865, they went to the town's collège, a school for boys. Arthur was an excellent student. He won many prizes, especially in Latin. In 1868, when he was thirteen, he secretly sent sixty lines of Latin verse to the son of the emperor Napoleon III. The poem was for the young prince's first communion, an important Catholic ceremony. In 1869, he won first prize in a Latin poetry contest for the whole school region. A school magazine also printed several of his Latin poems.

His first known poem in French, "Les Étrennes des orphelins" ("The Orphans' New Year Gifts"), appeared in a Paris magazine, the Revue pour tous, on 2 January 1870. He was fifteen years old.

That same month, a new teacher, Georges Izambard, arrived at the school. Izambard was only about twenty-one years old, and he loved modern poetry. He lent books to Rimbaud, talked with him, and became his first real friend and guide. Rimbaud soon began to write many poems in French, including "Sensation" and "Ophélie". In May 1870, he sent three poems to Théodore de Banville, a famous poet in Paris. He asked Banville to help him publish them. Banville answered politely, but he did not print the poems.

War and the first escapes (1870)

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia, then a German state. This was the Franco-Prussian War. The war soon reached the Ardennes, near Rimbaud's home. Classes stopped. Rimbaud was fifteen years old, and he felt trapped in his small town with his strict mother.

On 29 August 1870, he ran away for the first time. He took a train to Paris, but his ticket was only valid for part of the journey. When he arrived in Paris, he was arrested and put in Mazas prison. From prison, he wrote to his teacher Izambard. Izambard paid for his release and for a ticket to Douai, a town in the north of France. The Gindre sisters lived there. They were the family who had helped to raise Izambard. Rimbaud spent a few happy weeks with them. His mother demanded that he come home, and he returned at the end of September.

In early October, he ran away again, this time on foot. He walked through Belgium, tried without success to find work at a newspaper in Charleroi, visited Brussels, and then returned to Douai. There he met Paul Demeny, a young poet and a friend of Izambard. During his two stays in Douai, Rimbaud copied twenty-two of his poems on separate sheets of paper and left them with Demeny. He probably hoped that Demeny would have them printed. Today these sheets are called the "Cahiers de Douai" ("Douai notebooks"), although Rimbaud himself gave them no title and no fixed order. They are kept at the British Library in London. Among these early poems are some of his best-loved works: "Le Dormeur du val" ("The Sleeper in the Valley", about a young dead soldier), "Au Cabaret-Vert", "Roman", and "Ma Bohème".

On 1 November 1870, the police brought him back to his mother. That winter, he stayed in Charleville. He was bored and angry, and often walked for hours with his school friend Ernest Delahaye. He also published a short comic text, "Le Rêve de Bismarck", in a local newspaper under a false name.

Between Charleville and Paris (1871)

On 25 February 1871, Rimbaud went to Paris again. He stayed there for about two weeks. He looked at the world of books and newspapers, but he found no work. Then he walked most of the way back home. He arrived in Charleville on 10 March.

A few days later, on 18 March 1871, the people of Paris rose up against the French government. This event is called the Paris Commune. Rimbaud was excited by it. He wrote angry poems in support of the Commune, and against the government and the Church. These poems include "Chant de guerre parisien" ("Paris War Song") and "L'Orgie parisienne". Some friends later said that he went to Paris during the Commune and stayed for a short time with its fighters. Historians are not sure if this is true, because his letters show that he was in Charleville in mid-April and mid-May. In May, the Commune was crushed with great violence.

Rimbaud never went back to school. He let his hair grow, smoked a pipe, and drank in cafés. He also tried to shock the quiet people of Charleville.

The letters of the "seer"

In May 1871, Rimbaud wrote two letters that later became very famous. The first letter, written on 13 May, was sent to his teacher Izambard. The second, written on 15 May, was sent to Paul Demeny. These letters are called the "Lettres du voyant" ("Letters of the seer"). A seer is a person who can see hidden things, like a prophet.

In these letters, the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud explained a new idea of poetry. He wrote: "Je est un autre", which means "I is somebody else". By this strange sentence, he meant that a person's deep self is not fully known, even by that person. It is like a stranger. He also wrote that the poet must become a seer "by a long, huge and carefully planned disordering of all the senses". This means that the poet must change the usual order of sight, hearing, touch, and the other senses. He must also try every form of love, suffering, and madness. In this way, the poet uses himself up in order to reach "the unknown" and bring back new visions.

At the time, no important writer or critic read these letters. The letter to Demeny was first printed in 1912, and the letter to Izambard was first printed in 1928, long after Rimbaud's death. In the 20th century, they became some of the most quoted texts about the meaning of poetry.

In June 1871, Rimbaud asked Demeny to burn all the poems he had given him in Douai. Fortunately, Demeny did not obey.

Paris with Verlaine (1871–1872)

Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second from the left) in Coin de table by Henri Fantin-Latour (1872).

In September 1871, Rimbaud sent two letters and some of his newest poems to Paul Verlaine, a poet in Paris whom he admired. Verlaine was ten years older than Rimbaud. A year earlier, he had married Mathilde Mauté, a seventeen-year-old girl. He lived with her in the house of her rich parents. Verlaine was amazed by the poems. He answered: "Venez, chère grande âme, on vous appelle, on vous attend" ("Come, dear great soul, we call you, we wait for you"). He and his friends collected money to pay for Rimbaud's train ticket.

Before he left, Rimbaud finished a long poem of one hundred lines, "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"). In this poem, a boat speaks. It has lost its crew and moves freely across wild seas. It sees wonderful things that no one has seen before. Rimbaud himself had never seen the sea. He read the poem to his friend Delahaye on the day before he left.

At the end of September 1871, Rimbaud arrived in Paris. He was not yet seventeen. Verlaine took him to a dinner of the "Vilains Bonshommes", a group of poets. There, Rimbaud read "Le Bateau ivre" aloud. The poets were amazed. Soon afterwards, the photographer Étienne Carjat took pictures of him. One of these pictures shows a boy with light eyes looking far away. It is now the most famous image of Rimbaud.

But Rimbaud behaved very badly. He was rude, dirty, and often silent or insulting. Mathilde's parents threw him out of their house. Verlaine's friends gave him rooms, one after another. For a time, he lived with a poor musician, Ernest Cabaner, in a hotel. A group of young poets, the "Zutistes", met there to drink and to write comic poems together in a shared notebook, the Album zutique. The painter Henri Fantin-Latour put Verlaine and Rimbaud, side by side, in a large group picture of poets, Coin de table (Corner of the Table, 1872). The picture is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

In March 1872, at one of the poets' dinners, Rimbaud was drunk and shouted insults while a bad poet was reading. Carjat, the photographer, angrily told him to stop. Rimbaud then cut him slightly with Verlaine's sword-cane, a walking stick with a hidden blade. After this, most writers in Paris refused to see Rimbaud. People later said that the angry Carjat destroyed most of his photographs of him.

Worse still, Verlaine and Rimbaud had become lovers. At that time, love between two men was seen as shameful, and people talked about them. Verlaine drank more and more, and he became violent at home. He hurt his young wife and, one night, even hurt their newborn son. In early 1872, Mathilde left Paris for a time with the baby, and Rimbaud was sent back to the Ardennes to calm the situation. In May, he quietly returned to Paris.

New poems and the flight to London (1872)

In the spring of 1872, Rimbaud wrote a new kind of poem. These short poems are often called "Vers nouveaux" ("New verses") or "Chansons" ("Songs"). They are light, musical, strange, and much freer than his earlier poems. They include "Larme", "La Rivière de Cassis", "Comédie de la soif", "Chanson de la plus haute tour", "Fêtes de la faim", and the famous lines about eternity. In these lines, the poet says that eternity has been found again: it is the sea mixed with the sun.

On 7 July 1872, Verlaine left his wife and child without a word and ran away with Rimbaud. They first went to Belgium. Mathilde and her mother followed them to Brussels and begged Verlaine to come home. He got on the train with them, but escaped at the border station and went back to Rimbaud.

In September 1872, the two poets crossed the sea from Ostend to Dover and went to live in London. They lived among French exiles from the Paris Commune. Exiles are people who have to live outside their own country. They stayed in poor rooms, at first near Fitzroy Square. They studied English in the British Museum Reading Room and tried to earn a little money by giving French lessons. Most of their money came from Verlaine's mother. At the end of November, Rimbaud went home for the winter. In January 1873, Verlaine was ill and begged him to come back. Rimbaud then returned to London.

In April 1873, the two men separated for a time. Rimbaud went to his mother's farm at Roche. There, he told Delahaye, he was writing a book in prose with a dark title: a "pagan book" or "black book". This work would later become Une saison en enfer. At the end of May, the two men met again and returned to London. They lived in a room at 8 Great College Street, in Camden Town. They were poor, they drank, and they fought more and more.

The gunshot in Brussels (1873)

On 3 July 1873, after another quarrel, Verlaine suddenly left Rimbaud in London and took a boat to Belgium. Rimbaud had no money. He wrote Verlaine a desperate letter: "Reviens, reviens, cher ami, seul ami, reviens" ("Come back, come back, dear friend, my only friend, come back").

From Brussels, Verlaine sent many wild letters. He told his wife to join him within three days, or he would kill himself. His wife did not come, but his mother did. On 8 July, he sent a telegram to Rimbaud. A telegram was a fast message sent by electric wire. Rimbaud arrived in Brussels that same evening. He and Verlaine took rooms with Verlaine's mother at the hotel À la Ville de Courtrai, in the rue des Brasseurs. For two days, they argued. Rimbaud said that he wanted to leave Verlaine for ever.

On the morning of 10 July 1873, Verlaine bought a revolver, a small hand gun, and a box of fifty bullets. He drank a lot. In the early afternoon, during another argument in the hotel room, he fired two shots at Rimbaud. One bullet hit Rimbaud in the left wrist. Doctors bandaged the wound at the Saint-Jean hospital. In the evening, Rimbaud still wanted to take the train home. On the way to the station, Verlaine walked with his hand in his pocket and seemed ready to shoot again. Rimbaud ran to a policeman and asked for help. Verlaine was arrested at once.

Rimbaud stayed in the Saint-Jean hospital from 11 to 19 July. On 17 July, the bullet was removed from his wrist. He told the judge that Verlaine had been drunk and was not in control of himself. On 19 July, he officially gave up all legal action against him. But the Belgian court had found love letters in the men's papers. A doctor had also examined Verlaine's body for signs of sex between men. Because of this scandal, the judges were severe. On 8 August 1873, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison and had to pay a fine. He was held first in a prison in Brussels, and then in the prison of Mons. The two poets hardly ever saw each other again.

A Season in Hell (1873)

The first edition of Une saison en enfer (Brussels, 1873), the only book Rimbaud published himself.

Rimbaud went back to his mother's farm at Roche. His family later remembered that he shut himself in the barn while he wrote. They said that he groaned and sometimes cried. There, during the summer of 1873, in pain and anger, he finished his book in prose. He dated it "April–August 1873" and gave it the title Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell).

It is the only book that Rimbaud himself ever published. He gave the text to a printer in Brussels, Jacques Poot, of the "Alliance typographique". The small book was about fifty pages long. It was ready at the end of October 1873. About four hundred copies were printed, but Rimbaud could not pay the printer's full bill. He went back to Brussels, stayed once again at the hotel where Verlaine had shot him, and received only about ten author's copies. He sent one copy to Verlaine, who was now in the prison of Mons. The copy had a written dedication, a personal message at the front of the book. Almost all the other copies stayed in the printer's storeroom, tied up in packets. They were found there only in 1901, by a Belgian book lover, Léon Losseau, ten years after Rimbaud's death.

Une saison en enfer is a short and intense confession, written in poetic prose. In a confession, a writer tells the truth about himself. The speaker looks back on his life as if it were a season spent in hell. In the part called "Délires I" ("Ravings I"), a "foolish virgin" complains about her "infernal husband". Readers understand that this is a picture of Verlaine and Rimbaud themselves. In "Délires II: Alchimie du verbe" ("Alchemy of the Word"), Rimbaud judges his own poetry from the year before. He quotes some of his songs and calls his old dream of a magic language a beautiful madness. The book ends with a farewell, "Adieu". This part contains one of his most quoted sentences: "Il faut être absolument moderne" ("One must be absolutely modern").

In November 1873, Rimbaud brought copies to Paris. The literary world blamed him for the Verlaine scandal and no longer wanted him. Only one new friend welcomed him: the young poet Germain Nouveau. Rimbaud spent the winter at home in Charleville.

Last literary years (1874–1875)

In March 1874, Rimbaud returned to London, this time with Germain Nouveau. They lived at 178 Stamford Street, near Waterloo station. They offered French lessons in small newspaper advertisements. During these months, Rimbaud made careful copies of his prose poems, which later became Illuminations. A few pages are in Nouveau's handwriting. In June, Nouveau went back to France. In July, Rimbaud's mother and his sister Vitalie came to London to help him. Vitalie described the visit in her diary. In the autumn, Rimbaud placed advertisements in English newspapers. He probably found a short teaching job in Scarborough, on the east coast of England. At the end of the year, he was home again.

In February 1875, he moved to Stuttgart, in Germany, to learn German. In March, he became a tutor, or private teacher, in the family of a pastor, a Protestant priest. On 20 March, Verlaine came to see him. Verlaine had just left prison and had become deeply religious. The meeting went badly. In a joking letter to Delahaye, Rimbaud wrote that Verlaine had arrived with a rosary, a string of prayer beads. He also wrote that, three hours later, they had made Verlaine give up his God. It was the last time the two poets ever met.

Before Verlaine left, Rimbaud gave him the manuscript of his prose poems. A manuscript is a text written by hand. Rimbaud asked Verlaine to send it to Germain Nouveau in Brussels, so that it could be printed. Verlaine posted the package and even complained about the price of the stamps: 2 francs 75. As far as we know, this was Rimbaud's last act as a writer. He was twenty years old.

That spring, he sold his luggage, crossed Switzerland, walked over the high Saint Gotthard Pass, and came down into Italy, to Milan. There, a kind widow gave him a room. In June, while he was walking on a hot road in Tuscany, he collapsed from sunstroke, an illness caused by too much sun. The French consul, the local officer of the French state, sent him back by ship to Marseille. He spent the autumn and winter at home, studying languages and learning the piano. A small comic poem called "Rêve" ("Dream"), hidden in a letter to Delahaye in October 1875, is the last verse that we have from him.

On 18 December 1875, his sister Vitalie died. She was seventeen years old. She died from a disease of the knee joint caused by tuberculosis. Rimbaud stood at her grave with his head shaved.

Years on the road (1876–1879)

For the next four years, Rimbaud tried one life after another. He was always leaving, and always coming home again.

In April 1876, he went to Vienna, where a coach driver stole his money. The police then sent him out of Austria, and he walked home. In May, he travelled to the Netherlands and joined the Dutch colonial army for six years. This army needed soldiers for its islands in Asia. On 10 June 1876, he sailed from Holland on the troop ship Prins van Oranje. The ship went through the new Suez Canal to Java, in today's Indonesia. He reached his camp at Salatiga at the beginning of August. Two weeks later, on 15 August, he deserted, or ran away from the army. This was a serious crime. Under a false name, he boarded a Scottish sailing ship, the Wandering Chief. The ship took him around the Cape of Good Hope, past the island of Saint Helena, and then to Ireland. He was back in Charleville on 9 December 1876.

In 1877, he was in Cologne and then in Bremen. There, he wrote to the consul of the United States and asked to join the American navy. He received no answer. In Hamburg, he found work with a travelling circus, the Cirque Loisset, and followed it to Stockholm and Copenhagen. In the autumn, he took a ship from Marseille to Egypt. He became ill at sea, landed in Italy, visited Rome, and came home once again.

In January 1878, a London magazine, The Gentleman's Magazine, printed his poem "Les Effarés" in French. It appeared under the title "Petits Pauvres" and under the name "Alfred Rimbaud". Rimbaud probably never knew this. That summer, he worked on his mother's farm for the first time. In November, his father died in Dijon. There is no sign that the news affected him deeply.

On 20 October 1878, his twenty-fourth birthday, Rimbaud left again on foot. He crossed the Vosges hills, then Switzerland. In the middle of November, he walked over the Saint Gotthard Pass through deep snow. He described this crossing, step by step, in a long letter to his family. From Genoa, he sailed to Alexandria in Egypt. There, a French company hired him to work on the island of Cyprus.

From December 1878 to May 1879, Rimbaud led workers at a stone quarry near Larnaca, in Cyprus. A quarry is a place where stone is cut out of the ground. The work was hard, the workers were difficult, and fevers were common. In late May 1879, he caught typhoid, a dangerous fever, and had to go home. He spent the summer helping with the harvest at Roche. In the autumn, his old friend Delahaye visited him and asked if he still thought about literature. Delahaye remembered Rimbaud's answer all his life: "Je ne pense plus à ça" ("I do not think about that any more").

Aden and Harar (1880–1885)

Rimbaud photographed by himself in Harar (1883).

In March 1880, Rimbaud returned to Cyprus. He led building work for the British rulers of the island, high in the mountains. In the summer, he left after quarrels about his pay. He did not go home. Instead, he went south, down the Red Sea, and looked for work in several very hot ports: Jeddah, Suakin, Massawa, and Hodeida. In August 1880, he reached Aden, a rocky harbour town with very little water. Aden was then under British rule and is now in Yemen. There, a French trading company, Mazeran, Viannay, Bardey et Cie, gave him a job. He was in charge of workers who sorted coffee beans.

In November 1880, the company sent him to open a trading post in Harar. Harar was an old walled city in the highlands of east Africa, in today's Ethiopia. At that time, Egypt ruled the city, and very few Europeans had lived there. Rimbaud travelled from the coast at Zeilah with a camel caravan. A caravan is a group of people and animals travelling together. After about twenty days, he entered Harar on 13 December 1880.

For the next five years, he worked for the Bardey brothers. He lived sometimes in Harar and sometimes in Aden. He bought and sold coffee, animal skins, and ivory, the hard white material from elephant tusks. His letters home from these years are plain and sad. He complains about boredom, heat, and loneliness. He often asks for technical books. He also dreams of saving enough money to come home rich, marry, and have a son.

He also bought a camera, which arrived from Lyon after a very long wait. In Harar, in the spring of 1883, he took the first known photographs of the city. Seven of his photographs survive. Three of them are pictures of himself, thin and grey-looking, in white cotton clothes. In May 1883, he sent the three self-portraits to his family. The pictures were pale because the water he used to develop them was bad. To develop a photograph means to make the image appear. He wrote: "Ceci est seulement pour rappeler ma figure" ("This is only to remind you of my face").

In August 1883, he organised a trading and exploring journey into the Ogaden. The Ogaden was a dangerous region between Harar and the Somali country. An Italian traveller had just been killed there. Rimbaud's Greek employee Sotiro did most of the travelling. Rimbaud himself made a shorter trip. He then wrote a clear and exact report about the land, the people, and the roads. His employer sent the report to the Geographical Society in Paris. It was read at a meeting on 1 February 1884 and printed in the Society's journal. Geographers praised it. The Society asked Rimbaud to send information about his life for an album of explorers, but he never sent anything.

He did not know that, at the same time, his name was becoming known again in Paris. In 1883, Verlaine published articles about him in the little magazine Lutèce. In 1884, these articles became a book, Les Poètes maudits (The Cursed Poets). The book included several poems by Rimbaud, among them the sonnet "Voyelles". Verlaine called his lost friend "the man with soles of wind". Young poets began to admire this unknown genius. Many of them believed that he was dead.

In 1884, a political crisis forced the Bardey agency in Harar to close, and Rimbaud went back to Aden. "It is impossible to live a harder life than mine," he wrote home. The Bardey brothers then started a new company and hired him again. During these years in Aden, from 1884 to 1886, he lived with a young Ethiopian woman, perhaps called Mariam. At that time, Ethiopians were often called Abyssinians by Europeans. When Rimbaud left for his next business plan, he sent her away with a little money. Almost nothing more is known about her.

The guns for Menelik (1885–1887)

In October 1885, Rimbaud left the Bardey brothers. He wanted at last to become rich. He signed a contract with a French trader, Pierre Labatut. Their plan was to buy about two thousand old rifles cheaply in Liège, carry them far inland by caravan, and sell them at a high price to Menelik II, the king of Shoa. Menelik was trying to become more powerful in Ethiopia, and he needed weapons.

Everything went wrong. Rimbaud waited for about a year at Tadjoura, a very small port on the Gulf of Aden. Local Danakil chiefs blocked the road. In April 1886, France also forbade the export of weapons to Shoa. In the end, Rimbaud got special permission from the French government. But Labatut became ill with cancer, returned to France, and died. A second partner, the explorer Paul Soleillet, died suddenly in a street in Aden in September 1886. Rimbaud decided to continue alone.

In early October 1886, his caravan finally set out. It had about thirty camels, loaded with the two thousand rifles and seventy-five thousand cartridges, or ammunition for rifles. About thirty-four camel drivers and a translator went with the animals. The road crossed the Danakil desert, one of the hottest places on Earth. Armed nomads sometimes attacked travellers there. Nomads are people who move from place to place instead of living in one fixed home. Earlier that year, another French trader's caravan had been attacked and destroyed on the same road. The journey took four months. On 6 February 1887, Rimbaud reached Ankober, the old capital of Shoa.

The king was away, fighting the emir of Harar. An emir is a Muslim ruler. Labatut's widow then appeared and demanded payment for her husband's many debts. Rimbaud went on to Entotto, Menelik's new mountain camp. The city of Addis Ababa would soon grow near this place. There, Rimbaud met Alfred Ilg, a young Swiss engineer who had become the king's trusted adviser. Ilg would remain Rimbaud's best business friend in Africa. Menelik finally arrived at the beginning of March, with trumpets and two great Krupp cannons. These were very large guns, and each one was carried by eighty men. Menelik had just captured many modern rifles in Harar, so he bought Rimbaud's old guns at a very low price. He also took Labatut's debts from the money he owed. After nearly two years of danger and waiting, Rimbaud had earned almost nothing.

In May 1887, Rimbaud travelled back to Harar with the explorer Jules Borelli. They took a new road through the Itu country. In Harar, the governor, Ras Makonnen, paid part of the debt with written promises to pay later. Ras Makonnen was a cousin of Menelik and later the father of the emperor Haile Selassie. Rimbaud was exhausted and half sick. He then took a long rest in Egypt with his young Harari servant, Djami. The passport made for him in Cairo in September 1887 names "his servant Giami". On the way, a French official described him in a report as "un sieur Rimbaud se disant négociant" ("a certain Rimbaud, saying that he was a trader"). From Cairo, Rimbaud wrote to his family on 23 August 1887: "J'ai les cheveux absolument gris" ("My hair is completely grey"). He was thirty-two. On 25 and 27 August 1887, the French-language newspaper in Cairo, Le Bosphore égyptien, printed his notes about his journey to Shoa. He also offered travel articles to major Paris newspapers, but they did not print them.

A trader in Harar (1888–1891)

In May 1888, Rimbaud opened his own trading agency in Harar. He worked with César Tian, a rich French merchant from Aden. Rimbaud rented a house and bought and sold many things: coffee, animal skins, ivory, gum, gold, cloth, glass beads, and tools. Gum is a sticky product that comes from some trees. He was the only French trader in the city, and one of the few Europeans there. He worked without rest. He also kept money and did business for other Europeans in the region. Explorers and traders who passed through Harar, such as Borelli, Armand Savouré, and Ilg, stayed at his house. He had good relations with the governor, Ras Makonnen.

His letters home were still sad. On 4 August 1888, he wrote: "Je m'ennuie beaucoup, toujours; je n'ai même jamais connu personne qui s'ennuyât autant que moi" ("I am very bored, always; I have never known anyone as bored as I am").

Some older books said that Rimbaud traded in slaves during these years. Historians have studied his letters and business records, but they have found no proof of this. The scholars Mario Matucci and Jean Voellmy showed that the story was a legend. It came mostly from a request that Rimbaud sent to Ilg at the end of 1889 and repeated in 1890. He asked Ilg to buy "a very good mule and two slave boys" as house servants. Ilg refused in a letter of August 1890, and the purchase was never made. Rimbaud lived, like every trader in the region, in a world where slavery existed. But he was not a slave trader. The only time when he really sold weapons was the journey to Menelik.

At the same time, his fame in France kept growing, although he did not know or care much about it. In 1886, a small Paris magazine, La Vogue, had printed his Illuminations (see below). Young writers now saw him as a master. In July 1890, the editor of a small magazine in Marseille wrote to him in Harar. He called Rimbaud "the head of the decadent and symbolist school", meaning one of the leaders of the new poetry of the time. He asked Rimbaud to send poems. Rimbaud kept the letter in his papers, but he never answered it.

Illness and death (1891)

Rimbaud's grave in Charleville. The stone says: "Priez pour lui" ("Pray for him").

At the beginning of 1891, Rimbaud began to feel a growing pain in his right knee. The knee became swollen. He thought that it was a problem with his veins or with his joints. He asked his mother to send him a special stocking, a tight covering for the leg. By March, he could no longer walk. He ran his business from a bed on the terrace of his house. At the end of March, he decided to go to the doctors on the coast.

On 7 April 1891, he left Harar for ever. He was carried on a covered stretcher, a bed used to carry a sick person. He had designed it himself. Sixteen porters, or paid carriers, carried him about three hundred kilometres across the desert to the small port of Zeilah. The journey took eleven days, from 7 to 17 April. Rimbaud kept a short diary of it, almost hour by hour. The notes show that he was in great pain. From Zeilah, a boat took him to Aden. There, an English doctor found a dangerous illness inside the knee joint, called synovitis. At first, he spoke of cutting off the leg at once. Then he told Rimbaud to go to Europe.

On 9 May 1891, Rimbaud sailed for France on the ship L'Amazone. On 20 May, he entered the hospital of La Conception in Marseille. The doctors found cancer and decided to amputate his right leg, or cut it off. He sent a telegram to his mother, asking her or Isabelle to come at once. His mother arrived on 23 May. On 27 May 1891, the leg was cut off high above the knee. In early June, his mother went back to the farm.

On 23 July, Rimbaud travelled in a special railway car to the station of Voncq, near Roche. He spent the summer at the farm, with more and more pain. He learned to walk with a wooden leg and crutches. Crutches are walking sticks that go under the arms. But his other limbs slowly became weaker. He could not bear this. On 23 August, he left again for Marseille with his sister Isabelle. He still dreamed of taking a ship back to Aden. The next day, he had to be carried into the hospital of La Conception again. The cancer was spreading through his body. Little by little, he became paralysed and could not move.

Isabelle stayed beside him day and night. Her letters to their mother describe his last months. He wept when he looked at the sun through the window. He told Isabelle: "I shall go under the earth, and you will walk in the sun." Old friends from Aden, including his first employer Alfred Bardey, came to say goodbye.

On 25 October, after refusing many times, he agreed to confess to the hospital priest. To confess means to tell one's sins to a priest. Isabelle wrote to her mother that the priest had come out saying that her brother had faith. Historians are careful about this famous "conversion", because Isabelle was very religious and wanted her brother to have a holy death. Also, no one else saw it. In his delirium, a confused state caused by illness, Rimbaud murmured "Allah Kerim", a Muslim phrase accepting fate. He thought that his sister was his servant Djami. He also described strange visions which, Isabelle said, sounded like the Illuminations.

On 9 November 1891, with his last strength, he dictated a letter to Isabelle. This means that he spoke the words and she wrote them down. The letter was for the director of a shipping company. In it, he asked the price of a passage to "Aphinar", a place that cannot be found on any map. He wrote: "Je suis complètement paralysé, donc je désire me trouver de bonne heure à bord, dites-moi à quelle heure je dois être transporté à bord" ("I am completely paralysed, so I wish to be on board early; tell me at what time I must be carried on board").

Arthur Rimbaud died the next day, 10 November 1891. He was thirty-seven years old. At that same time, a Paris publisher was printing a book of his poems, called Reliquaire, without his knowledge.

His body was taken by train to Charleville. The funeral took place on 14 November at ten in the morning. His mother ordered the most expensive kind of ceremony. It was prepared in one hour, with singers and altar boys, boys who help the priest. She refused to invite anyone. Only two people walked behind the coffin: his mother and Isabelle. Rimbaud was buried in the family tomb, next to his sister Vitalie. On the white stone, one can read: "Priez pour lui" ("Pray for him"). Two years later, his old friend Germain Nouveau, who did not know that he was dead, was still writing him a letter addressed to Aden.

Works

Rimbaud left only a small amount of work: about one hundred poems in verse, one short book in prose, Une saison en enfer, one collection of prose poems, Illuminations, a few school texts and comic texts, and several hundred letters. Verse means poetry written in lines. Prose means writing in ordinary sentences. Almost none of these texts were published during his life with his agreement.

The poems in verse

The manuscript of the sonnet "Voyelles".

Rimbaud's verse poems can be put into clear groups. First come the school poems in Latin, and a childhood story in prose sometimes called "Le Soleil était encore chaud..." ("The sun was still warm...", about 1864–1865). Then come the French poems of 1870. Many of them are in the "Cahiers de Douai". They include poems about nature, such as "Sensation"; dreams of love, such as "Roman"; satirical poems against the middle class and the empire of Napoleon III, such as "À la musique", "Vénus Anadyomène", and "L'éclatante victoire de Sarrebruck"; war poems, such as "Le Dormeur du val"; and poems about the open road, such as "Ma Bohème". A satirical poem makes fun of people or ideas. "Soleil et chair" (1870) is a long hymn, or song of praise, to nature and the old gods.

The poems of 1871 are darker and more violent. They include "Les Assis", "Les Poètes de sept ans", "Les Premières Communions", the poems about the Paris Commune, and "Le Cœur volé". The sonnet "Voyelles" ("Vowels") also belongs to this year. In it, Rimbaud gives a colour to each vowel of the alphabet: "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles" ("A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels"). Another famous poem from this time is "Le Bateau ivre". A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines. Rimbaud wrote many sonnets, but he changed their rules more and more.

The "Vers nouveaux" of 1872 are his last poems in verse. They are strange songs with uneven lines. They are partly like prayers and partly like nursery rhymes, or simple children's songs. They include "Chanson de la plus haute tour", "L'Éternité", "Ô saisons, ô châteaux", and "Mémoire". With these poems, French verse moved far away from its classical rules.

Rimbaud also wrote comic and insulting poems with the Zutiste circle in the Album zutique (1871). He also wrote a comic story in prose, "Un cœur sous une soutane" ("A Heart under a Cassock", 1870). A cassock is the long robe of a priest. This text was first printed only in 1924, by young surrealist writers. Two other short prose texts also survive: "Les Déserts de l'amour" (around 1871) and the "Proses évangéliques" (around 1872–1873).

Une saison en enfer

Une saison en enfer (1873) is Rimbaud's only true book. It is short, about fifty pages in nine parts. It mixes memories, self-mockery, ideas about God, and ideas about poetry. Self-mockery means laughing at oneself. The sentences are quick, broken, and intense. Readers have argued about the meaning of the book for more than a century. Is it the diary of a religious crisis? Is it the story of his relationship with Verlaine? Is it a farewell to poetry? It may be all of these at the same time. One of its most famous sentences is "Il faut être absolument moderne" ("One must be absolutely modern"). It has become part of the French language.

Illuminations

Illuminations is a group of about fifty short texts. Almost all of them are prose poems. Two of them, "Marine" and "Mouvement", are in free verse, and are among the first free-verse poems in French. The texts describe dawns, floods, giant dream cities, circus people, gods, and machines. Their images follow one another without clear logic, like scenes seen in flashes of light. Among the best-loved pieces are "Aube" ("Dawn": "J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été" – "I embraced the summer dawn"), "Après le Déluge", "Enfance", "Villes", "Barbare", and "Génie".

The story of the manuscript is long and complicated. Rimbaud left the texts on separate sheets, without a title page and without dates. Some sheets have page numbers, but nobody knows for sure whether Rimbaud or the first editor wrote them. In Stuttgart in 1875, Rimbaud gave the sheets to Verlaine. He asked Verlaine to send them to Germain Nouveau, so that they could be printed. Nothing happened. The pages passed from person to person for ten years and were thought to be lost. In 1886, they reached Gustave Kahn, the director of the young symbolist magazine La Vogue. His helper Félix Fénéon put the loose sheets in order. He later said that they were "like a pack of cards". The texts were printed between 13 May and 21 June 1886, together with verse poems from 1872. In October of the same year, they came out as a small book of about a hundred pages, with a short introduction by Verlaine. A few more pieces, found later, were added in 1895. Verlaine explained that the English word "illuminations" here means coloured plates, or coloured pictures. Rimbaud, in Harar, probably never knew that the book existed. Scholars still discuss when the texts were written: before or after Une saison en enfer.

Letters and other writings

Rimbaud's letters are now read almost like his poems. The two "seer" letters of May 1871 are studied in schools and universities. The letters from Africa are very different. They are plain, tired, and practical. They speak of money, goods, illness, and boredom. Their dryness moves many readers. One of the most important French poets of the nineteenth century is seen there counting his money at the edge of the desert. Other writings from these years include his report on the Ogaden (1883), a clear and exact geographical text, his travel account printed in Cairo in 1887, and the short, very sad diary of his last journey on a stretcher in 1891.

List of main works

The dates below are the dates when the texts were written. Most of them were printed much later.

• "Les Étrennes des orphelins" (1870), his first printed poem
• The twenty-two poems of the "Cahiers de Douai" (1870), including "Le Dormeur du val", "Roman", and "Ma Bohème"
• The poems of 1871, including "Le Bateau ivre", "Voyelles", "Les Assis", and "Les Poètes de sept ans"
• The two "seer" letters (13 and 15 May 1871)
• Comic poems written with friends in the Album zutique (1871)
• "Un cœur sous une soutane" (1870, printed only in 1924)
• "Les Déserts de l'amour" (around 1871) and the "Proses évangéliques" (around 1872–1873)
• The "Vers nouveaux" or "Chansons" (1872), including "Larme", "L'Éternité", "Ô saisons, ô châteaux", and "Mémoire"
• Une saison en enfer (1873), the only book that he published himself
• Illuminations (written around 1872–1875, printed in 1886)
• "Rêve" (1875), his last known poem
• The report on the Ogaden (1883, printed in 1884) and the account of his journey to Shoa (printed in Cairo in 1887)
• Several hundred letters (1870–1891)
• Books made after his death, including Reliquaire (1891) and the Poésies complètes (1895)

Ideas and style

"I is somebody else": the poet as seer

Rimbaud's central idea appears in the letters that he wrote in May 1871. He says there that the poet must become a "voyant", or seer. A seer is a person who can see hidden things. Ordinary poetry, he says, only decorates the writer's small personal feelings. True poetry must explore the unknown.

To do this, the poet must first break open his own self. He must "disorder all his senses". This means that he must change the usual order of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. He must pass through every kind of love, suffering, and madness. Then he must tell what he has seen in a new language. "Je est un autre" ("I is somebody else") is his most famous sentence from these letters. The sentence breaks grammar on purpose. It means that the voice which thinks and sings inside us is deeper and stranger than our everyday "I".

During his Paris and London years, Rimbaud tried to live this idea. He used alcohol, hunger, drugs, wandering, and scandal as ways to change himself. In Une saison en enfer, he looked back on this experiment with sharp irony, or mocking humour. He called it one of his follies. Readers still disagree about what this means. Did he give up the whole idea of the seer, or only the dangerous ways he had used to reach it?

New forms for poetry

In only a few years, Rimbaud moved through many forms of French poetry and then went beyond them. He began with classical alexandrines, the traditional French lines of twelve syllables. Then he changed them. He used broken rhythms, rude words, and strange rhymes. In 1872, he wrote songs so light and unusual that they hardly seem built at all. Then he left verse for the prose poem, and took this form further than earlier poets had done. Finally, in "Marine" and "Mouvement", he wrote lines with no fixed length and no rhyme. This is called free verse. Many historians think that these texts helped to change French poetry in the 20th century.

His style is fast, concrete, and surprising. He mixes noble words with street slang, or very informal words. He also mixes science with prayer, Latin memories with children's speech, and realistic details with strange visions. He often uses lists, colours, and exclamations. In "Alchimie du verbe" ("Alchemy of the Word"), he calls this "simple hallucination". A hallucination is seeing something that is not really there. He says, for example, that he trained himself to see "a mosque in the place of a factory", and to write it down as if it were a fact.

Main subjects

Some subjects return again and again in Rimbaud's work. The first is revolt: against his mother, against school, against the Church, against the government, and even against poetry itself. Another important subject is the road: walking, escaping, leaving, and feeling the wind in one's face. His early poem "Sensation" and his late prose text "Départ" are both about going away.

Nature, light, and water fill many of his poems. The sea is everywhere in "Le Bateau ivre", although Rimbaud had never seen the sea when he wrote it. Childhood is also very important in his work. It appears as both tender and cruel. Under all these subjects there is a strong hunger for another life. In Une saison en enfer, one voice says: "La vraie vie est absente" ("Real life is absent").

Fame

How the poems reached readers

Rimbaud published almost nothing himself, and his fame grew while he was far away from France. Verlaine's book Les Poètes maudits (1884) helped to make his poems known to a wider public. In 1886, the magazine La Vogue printed the Illuminations and many of the verse poems. The book Reliquaire appeared in the same week as Rimbaud's death in 1891. In 1892, the publisher Vanier printed Une saison en enfer and the Illuminations together in one volume, with a preface by Verlaine. More complete editions began to appear in 1895. In 1901, the forgotten copies of Une saison en enfer were found in Brussels. In 1912, the "seer" letter to Demeny was printed for the first time. The letter to Izambard was printed later, in 1928. Preparing editions of Rimbaud is still difficult today, because his papers were scattered. Specialists still have to decide the best text and the best order for some of his writings.

His family also helped to shape his image. His sister Isabelle and her husband, the writer Paterne Berrichon, published books about him. They made Rimbaud look pure and almost holy, and they left out or softened many things that shocked them. Later scholars had to correct much of this religious picture of the poet.

The "Rimbaud myth"

Very early, the real story of Rimbaud's life became something larger: a modern myth. He was seen as the boy genius who wrote great poems when he was sixteen, gave up literature when he was twenty, and then disappeared into Africa. Each generation understood this myth in its own way. Some Catholic readers, following his sister's account of his last days, saw him as a great sinner who was saved at the end. The writer Paul Claudel, whose own religious faith began after he read the Illuminations, called Rimbaud "a mystic in the wild state". By this he meant a person with a strong natural religious feeling, not taught by the Church. Rebels of many kinds saw Rimbaud as a hero of escape. The surrealists, in the 1920s, found in his "disordering of all the senses" a model for their own experiments with dreams and the unconscious, the hidden part of the mind. The French scholar René Étiemble wrote a large book to describe and criticise this "myth of Rimbaud".

The facts of his life were already unusual. An important poet stopped writing at twenty and became a trader. He never explained why. When writers tried to contact him in Africa, he did not answer. That silence has become part of world literature.

Influence on writers, music and film

Rimbaud had a very strong influence on modern poetry. Many modern French poets learned something from him. This is true of the symbolists of the 1880s, Apollinaire, the surrealists around André Breton, René Char, and many others. Outside France, poets in many languages have read and translated him. In English, complete translations have been made by Wallace Fowlie, Louise Varèse, John Ashbery, and others.

Rimbaud also influenced music. In 1939, the English composer Benjamin Britten set nine texts from the Illuminations to music for voice and strings. The work is called Les Illuminations. The French singer Léo Ferré sang some of Rimbaud's poems. Rock musicians also admired him. Bob Dylan named Rimbaud and Verlaine in one of his songs and often spoke about Rimbaud. Patti Smith has called Rimbaud her first love as a poet. She has made special visits to his grave and to his house. Jim Morrison of The Doors read his poems many times.

Rimbaud's life has also been shown in films. The best-known film is Total Eclipse (1995), directed by Agnieszka Holland. In this film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rimbaud and David Thewlis plays Verlaine.

Places connected with Rimbaud

The Vieux Moulin in Charleville, today the Musée Arthur Rimbaud.

Charleville-Mézières was the town that Rimbaud always wanted to leave. Today, it is proud of his name. The Vieux Moulin, an old water mill on the river Meuse, is now the Musée Arthur Rimbaud. The family flat on the nearby quay, where he wrote "Le Bateau ivre", is another museum, the Maison des Ailleurs ("House of Elsewheres"). Visitors from many countries also come to see his simple white grave in the town cemetery.

In Harar, in Ethiopia, an old house is shown to travellers as the "Rimbaud House". It has a small museum, although Rimbaud never lived in that exact building. In Marseille, a plaque at the hospital of La Conception marks the place where the poet's "earthly adventure" ended.

In 2020, some French writers and politicians proposed moving the bodies of Rimbaud and Verlaine to the Panthéon in Paris. The Panthéon is the building where France honours some of its greatest people. Other people, including some in Charleville-Mézières, were against the idea. The plan did not happen. Rimbaud still lies next to his sister, under the stone that asks people passing by to pray for him.

Further reading

• Graham Robb, Rimbaud. London: Picador, 2000. (A large biography in English.)
• Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.
• Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997.
• Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie, updated by Seth Whidden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, translated by John Ashbery. New York: Norton, 2011.

Other websites

• (in French) Arthur Rimbaud's works in French on Wikisource
• (in French) Arthur Rimbaud, his work in audio version Archived 2021-04-24 at the Wayback Machine
• (in French) Musée Arthur Rimbaud, Charleville-Mézières (the official website of the Rimbaud museum)

Related pages

• Paul Verlaine
• Poetry
• Symbolism
• Free verse
• Paris Commune
• Charleville-Mézières