Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was a French poet whose radical verse and prose poems, written mostly before age twenty, helped shape modern literature.
A Season in Hell: A prose-poem sequence published by Rimbaud in 1873, recounting a spiritual and artistic crisis. Rimbaud’s only book published during his lifetime gives his most sustained account of his poetic crisis.
Charleville-Mézières: A city in northeastern France where Rimbaud was born and spent much of his youth. Its provincial setting shaped the young poet’s desire to escape conventional life.
Stéphane Mallarmé: A French poet whose experiments with syntax, sound, and suggestion shaped modern poetry. Mallarmé’s generation extended the formal possibilities Rimbaud had opened.
Charles Baudelaire: A French poet whose urban imagery and exploration of modernity influenced later literature. Baudelaire’s idea of the modern poet helped prepare the ground Rimbaud radically recast.
Illuminations: A collection of prose poems and free-verse poems by Rimbaud, composed mainly in the 1870s and published posthumously. These poems show the formal experimentation that made Rimbaud a precursor of modern poetry.
Franco-Prussian War: A war between France and Prussia and their allies, fought from 1870 to 1871 and ending in French defeat. The war and the collapse of the Second Empire formed the turmoil surrounding Rimbaud’s adolescence.
André Breton: A French writer and poet who founded Surrealism and championed the liberation of the imagination. Breton treated Rimbaud as a predecessor of poetry that breaks with rational convention.
Victor Hugo: A French Romantic writer and politician, celebrated for novels, plays, and poetry. Hugo’s public stature and rhetorical poetry embodied a literary authority the young Rimbaud resisted.
The Drunken Boat: A long poem by Rimbaud, written in 1871, in which a drifting boat narrates hallucinatory voyages. Its visionary imagery and liberated verse announced the direction of Rimbaud’s mature work.
Paris Commune: A revolutionary government that ruled Paris from March to May 1871 before being violently suppressed. Rimbaud wrote amid the Commune’s political upheaval and imagined poetry as a force for transformation.