On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud.

Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry is a mystery that continues to haunt his fans. Illustration by ANDRÉ CARRILHO

What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt and dismay Rimbaud fans is this “act of renunciation,” as Henry Miller put it in his rather loopy 1946 study of Rimbaud, “The Time of the Assassins,” which “one is tempted to compare . . . with the release of the atomic bomb.” The over-the-top comparison might well have pleased Rimbaud, who clearly wanted to vaporize his poetic past. When Alfred Bardey got back to Aden, bursting with his discovery, he found to his dismay that the former wunderkind refused to talk about his work, dismissing it as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting.”

That Rimbaud’s repudiation of poetry was as furious as the outpouring of his talent had once been was typical of a man whose life and work were characterized by violent contradictions. He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

These paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith. It had already begun to fascinate people by the time the poet died, in 1891. (He succumbed, at thirty-seven, to a cancer of the leg, after returning to his mama’s farm one last time.) To judge from the steady stream of Rimbaldiana that has appeared over the past decade—which includes, most recently, a new translation of “Illuminations,” by the distinguished American poet John Ashbery, and a substantial novel that wrestles with the great question of why Rimbaud stopped writing—the allure shows no sign of fading.

Depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later. He was born in October, 1854, in the town of Charleville, near the Belgian border. His father, Frédéric, was an Army captain who had fought in Algeria, and his mother, Vitalie Cuif, was a straitlaced daughter of solid farmers; it was later said that nobody could recall ever having seen her smile. To describe the marriage as an unhappy one would probably be to exaggerate, if for no other reason than that Captain Rimbaud was rarely in Charleville; each of the couple’s five children was born nine months after one of his brief leaves. When Arthur was five, his father went off to join his regiment and never came back. The memory of the abandonment haunts Rimbaud’s work, which often evokes lost childhood happiness, and occasionally seems to refer directly to his family’s crisis. (“She, / all black and cold, hurries after the man’s departure!”) Vitalie, devoutly Catholic, took to calling herself “Widow Rimbaud,” and applied herself with grim determination to her children’s education.

At school, Rimbaud was a star, regularly acing the daunting prize examinations. (One exam required students to produce a metrically correct Latin poem on the theme “Sancho Panza Addresses His Donkey.”) Not long after his fifteenth birthday, he composed “The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts,” the first poem he published. It’s a bit of treacle—two children awaken on New Year’s to realize that their mother has died—but it is notable for its thematic preoccupation, the absence of maternal love, and its precocious technical expertise. It seems likely that Rimbaud inherited his gifts and intellectual ambition from his father, who, while serving in North Africa, had produced an annotated translation of the Koran and a collection of Arab jokes. Rimbaud, who seems to have retained a romantic view of his father, sent for these texts when he moved to Africa; a formidable linguist, he became fluent in Arabic as well as a number of local dialects and even gave lessons on the Koran to local boys. His mother’s glumly concrete practicality (“Actions are all that count”) stood in stark contrast to these cerebral enthusiasms. It’s tempting to see, in the wild divergence between his parents’ natures, the origins of Rimbaud’s eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce.

Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. The frenetic pursuit of what, in one letter, he called “free freedom” runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud’s life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie’s dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes. Since he didn’t have enough money for the full fare, he was arrested and jailed on his arrival and, after writing a plaintive letter to a beloved teacher back in Charleville, Georges Izambard (and not, as far as we know, one to his mother), he was bailed out and slunk back home. The pattern of flight and return would recur up until his final return, a few months before his death.

Two days after the iconoclast’s arrival in the capital, France was defeated by Prussia and the Second Empire fell; soon after he got back home, the Paris Commune was established. Stuck in Charleville while great things were happening in the world (“I’m dying, decomposing under the weight of platitude”), the once model schoolboy let his hair grow long, sat around mocking the passing bourgeoisie, and smoked his clay pipe a lot. His yearning to break away now made itself felt in the poems he was writing. Some of these, as Izambard once put it, could have “the cheek to be charming.” (“Off I would go, with fists into torn pockets pressed. . . . Eh, what fine dreams I had, each one an amorous gest!”) But the desire to break out could express itself as well in a kind of literary vandalism. He’d already mocked the poetic conventions of the times (one early poem gives the goddess Venus an ulcer on her anus); to the period of frustrated ennui following his first escape, we owe such poems as “Accroupissements” (“Squattings”), which in elegantly metrical verse describes the effortful bowel movements of a priest, or “Les Assis” (“The Sitters”), which pokes vicious fun at the habitués of the town library where Rimbaud himself spent hours. Occasionally, he stole books.

However illicit the acquisition of those volumes, it reminds you that Rimbaud’s restless intellect continued to seethe. As Wyatt Mason points out in the vigorous and sensible introduction to his translation of the poet’s letters, as much as we now like to romanticize Rimbaud as a Dionysian rebel, spontaneously tossing off revolutionary verses, the fact is that he made himself a poet by following a distinctly Apollonian trajectory—“a long, involved, and sober study of the history of poetry.”

The combination of adolescent rebellion and poetic precocity yielded, in May, 1871, a grand statement of artistic purpose. In two letters, one to Izambard and the other to his friend Paul Demeny, also a poet, Rimbaud set out what he had come to see as his great project. To Izambard he wrote:

I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a Seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I’ve realized that I am a poet. It’s really not my fault.

The sixteen-year-old went on to make an assertion that Graham Robb, in his idiosyncratic yet magisterial 2001 biography, refers to as the “poetic E=mc2”: “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”). His insight, plain perhaps to us in our post-Freudian age but startling in its time, was that the subjective “I” was a construct, a useful fiction—something he’d deduced from the fact that the mind could observe itself at work, which suggested to him that consciousness itself, far from being straightforward, was faceted. (“I am present at the hatching of my thought.”) He suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind. “The first study of the man who wishes to be a poet is complete knowledge of himself,” he wrote in the letter to Demeny. “He searches his mind, inspects it, tries it out and learns to use it.”

In this letter, he tellingly added the adjective “rational” to “derangement of all the senses”—here again he was more Apollonian than we often think—and further asserted that this project required a new kind of poetic language, in which one sense became indistinguishable from another, sight from touch, hearing from smell: “summing up everything, perfumes, sounds and colors, thought latching on to thought and pulling.” In one of his most famous poems, he assigns colors to each vowel: “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.” Here, as so often, he was following the example of Baudelaire, the great iconoclast of the previous generation and the champion of synesthesia.

“Thought latching on to thought and pulling” is an ideal way to describe the workings of the major poem he produced during this crucial period, “Le Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). The poem is characterized by a formal correctness (it’s composed of twenty-five rhymed quatrains of alexandrines, the classic French six-beat line) placed in the service of a destabilizing fantasy—a dream of liberation from correct form. It ostensibly describes the downstream journey of a vessel that has lost its haulers, its rudder, its anchor, wandering to and fro and witnessing bizarre sights en route to nowhere in particular. (“Huge serpents, vermin-plagued, drop down into the mire / With black effluvium from the contorted trees!”) But as you make your way through the poem, each stanza seeming at once to latch tightly on to the last and yet move further into imaginative space, it seems to expand into a parable about life and art in which loss of control—of the boat, of the poem itself, of what we think “meaning” in a poem might be—becomes the key to a kind of spiritual and aesthetic redemption:

The wash of the green water on my shell of pine, Sweeter than apples to a child its pungent edge; It cleansed me of the stains of vomits and blue wine And carried off with it the rudder and the kedge.

Here, the two faces of Rimbaud’s desire to break out—the charming and the destructive—seamlessly come together, as the desire for consummation melds with a desire for annihilation: “Swollen by acrid love, sagging with drunkenness— / Oh, that my keel might rend and give me to the sea!”

Whatever else it is—and many find its inscrutability insurmountable—“The Drunken Boat” is the work of a poet who has achieved his mature voice. In September, 1871, Rimbaud made another bid to escape Charleville. He wrote a letter to Paul Verlaine, who, like Baudelaire, was one of the few poets whom Rimbaud admired, and enclosed a number of his poems. It was not long before he received the older poet’s invitation to come to the great city, expressed in words that proved prophetic: “Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.”

The rules of poetry weren’t the only things that Rimbaud broke when he arrived in Paris. Among other things—bric-a-brac, dishes, and furniture in the various homes where he was offered hospitality, and where his boorish behavior inevitably led to his eviction—he broke up Verlaine’s marriage. The two men apparently became lovers soon after Rimbaud’s arrival, embarking on an affair that scandalized Paris and made literary history. Verlaine’s brother-in-law, for one, was never taken in by the angelic face and striking pale-blue eyes; he dismissed Rimbaud at once as the “vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy whom everyone is in raptures about.”

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Between the autumn of 1871 and July, 1873, the couple wandered from Paris to Belgium to London and, finally, back to Brussels again, drinking absinthe, smoking hashish, engaging in outrageous public displays of affection (one newspaper article cattily referred to the younger man as “Mlle Rimbaud”), quarrelling, and—as Verlaine once boasted—making love “like tigers.” They apparently liked to puncture each other with knives, and jointly composed a poem called the “Asshole Sonnet,” complete with beautifully wrought, anatomically minute descriptions of that orifice. Many readers and biographers see the couple as what one critic calls “the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality,” but the evidence suggests that, as far as Rimbaud was interested in anyone other than himself, he was interested primarily in women. (Later, in Abyssinia, he lived with a strikingly good-looking local woman; she wore Western clothes and smoked cigarettes, while he wore native costume.) It is hard to escape the feeling that Verlaine, an ugly man whose appearance Rimbaud made cruel jokes about, was a kind of science experiment for the poet, part of his program of “rational derangement of all the senses,” his strident adolescent ambition to “reinvent” love, society, poetry. Indeed, for someone who uses the word “love” so often in his poetry, Rimbaud comes off as a cold fish; the tenderer emotions seem hypothetical to him.

Whatever the nature of the relationship, the period of their affair was one of tremendous growth for Rimbaud, whose work was undergoing a dramatic evolution. Entranced, at one point, by the charmingly simple lyrics of eighteenth-century operas, he wrote a number of poems so delicately attenuated, so stripped of descriptiveness, that they seem to have no referent at all. (“I have recovered it. / What? Eternity. / It is the sea / Matched with the sun.”) But the tranquillity of the verse was not reflected in everyday life; by the time the pair were living, impoverished, in London (they took to placing desperate ads for their services as French tutors), the relationship had seriously frayed. After a catastrophic scene that ended with Verlaine running off to Belgium, Rimbaud—more terrified of being poor and alone, you suspect, than of losing his lover—joined him in Brussels. There, on July 10, 1873, after yet another drama, the distraught Verlaine, who had been making suicide threats, used a revolver he’d intended for himself to shoot his lover in the arm.