He lived most of his adult life as a rather well-organised trader in, amongst other things, coffee and guns in the Middle East and Africa. He kept neat books.
Yet between the ages of fifteen (in 1870) and twenty, he had written a series of extraordinary poems that led him to be regarded by many as the founding father of modern poetry. And then no more.
He was Arthur Rimbaud.
His poems can still disturb, even shock. “Je est un autre,” he wrote. “I is someone else”.
In his later life he went so far as to describe his own poetic creations as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting”. Endeavouring to make sense of the change in Rimbaud, his former friend and lover, Paul Verlaine, said: “One big reason, perhaps obvious, is that the child in him died.”
His work has gripped so many – not least the composer, Benjamin Britten, who made an electrifying setting of parts of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. That opens:
J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.
I alone have the key to this savage show.
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