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At fifteen Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

began his short writing career with a few dozen traditional poems, which he produced over a period of three years. (The poems presented here come from this period.) Around the same time, as a vagabond in Paris, he began cultivating the image of "maudit" ("cursed") poet. At eighteen he stopped writing verse and turned to the prose-poems of "Les Illuminations" and "Une Saison en Enfer".

By the time he was twenty, a little over four years into his literary career, Rimbaud had completely renounced literature as an idiotic enterprise. The rest of his life was spent entirely outside the literary world, to all accounts utterly uninterested in the poetic revolution he knew to be taking place, in his name, in Paris. After five years' wandering, Rimbaud spent a decade scraping together a living in Abyssinia as a trafficker in various goods, among them guns and probably slaves. In 1891 Rimbaud left Africa with a severe inflammation of his right leg. Having made it as far as Marseilles, he entered a hospital and suffered the leg's amputation. A few months later, in December 1891, Arthur Rimbaud died at the age of 37. (For more on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, see Enid Starkie's distinguished biography, Arthur Rimbaud).

Joshua Mehigan lives in Brooklyn, NY and, until recently, worked as the editor of Poets & Writers Online. His own poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. In 1998 Alysia Peich handprinted Confusing Weather, a letterpress chapbook of his poems.