Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) wrote his entire incandescent, revolutionary poetic corpus between the ages of sixteen and twenty. In his 1871 'Letters of the Seer' (*Lettres du voyant*), he demanded that the poet become a visionary seer through a 'long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses', uttering his immortal insight: Je est un autre ('I is another').

Arriving in Paris in 1871 carrying Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat), Rimbaud ignited a turbulent, absinthe-soaked romantic liaison with poet Paul Verlaine across London and Brussels, which culminated in Verlaine shooting him in the wrist in 1873. Rimbaud published his prose spiritual testament Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873) and completed Illuminations before abruptly renouncing literature forever at twenty-one. He spent the rest of his life wandering as an explorer, coffee merchant, and gunrunner in Harar, Ethiopia, before dying of bone cancer in Marseille at thirty-seven.