Arthur Rimbaud (Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud) was born in Charleville, France, on 20 October, 1854, the second of four children. His strict, devoutly Catholic mother came from a local farming family. His father, an army captain, permanently abandoned the family six years later. A precocious student at the local collège, Rimbaud was writing verses in French and Latin by the age of fifteen. Two years later he sent some poems to the renowned poet Paul Verlaine, who responded with train fare to Paris and an invitation: ‘Come, dear great soul. We summon you, we await you.’ Eventually, Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and fled with Rimbaud to Belgium, then London, marking the beginning of a tumultuous love affair. Their relationship would end in Brussels a year later, after Verlaine shot Rimbaud, wounding him in the wrist. The older poet went to prison; the younger returned to his family’s farm in Roche to write poetry. Though begun before Une saison en enfer, the only work he saw through publication, Illuminations would not be published until 1886, with a brief preface by Verlaine. Rimbaud may have been unaware of its publication: by that time he had abandoned Europe and poetry to spend the rest of his short life working overseas, finally settling in the Horn of Africa as a trader. On 10 November, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, he died of cancer in Marseille following the amputation of a leg due to a tumour on his knee. Rimbaud is now considered a patron saint of symbolists and surrealists, and his works – which include Le bateau ivre (1871), Une saison en enfer (1873), and Illuminations – are widely recognised as a major influence on artists from Pablo Picasso to Bob Dylan.