Meet Rimbaud: poet, madman, modernist, gun-runner and 'vicious little monkey'

From Rimbaud: The Double Life Of A Rebel, By Edmund White

There's nothing like a biography of Rimbaud to dispel one's romantic illusions about the poet. Arriving in Paris from the Northern town of Charleville, 17 years old and bearing a copy of his visionary masterpiece, The Drunken Boat, Rimbaud turned up at the home that Verlaine shared with his wife and parents-in-law. He grunted his way through dinner, lit up a filthy pipe, then retired to his room. In the subsequent weeks he mutilated a crucifix, showered passers-by with head lice and slept in his boots before persuading the man of the house to run away with him. When a fellow poet took him in, he sold the furniture; after yet another was persuaded to give him a berth, he wiped his arse on his host's poems.

Manipulative, rude, filthy and impossibly fervent, he struck Verlaine as "an angel in exile" and everyone else as the teenager from hell. Edmond de Goncourt, who grudgingly hailed Rimbaud as a "genius of perversity", nonetheless concluded, as did many others, that "with the imagination of a vicious monkey, [Rimbaud] spent his life thinking up merciless wickednesses".

Goncourt was wrong, however: the span of Rimbaud's wickedness, the whole of his versifying career, was a bare five years. Between the ages of 15 and 20 Rimbaud wrote his entire corpus of poems, seduced and re-seduced the hapless, drunken and violent Verlaine, and persuaded him to move to London. After several separations, during one of which Verlaine threw his infant son against a wall and threatened to strangle his wife, the two men ended up together again in Brussels, where Verlaine bought a revolver during a drinking bout and shot Rimbaud in the wrist. His friend had him arrested and Verlaine served two years in prison. They spent two days together when he got out, and never saw one another again.