page_title: Arthur Rimbaud
section_title: Travels (1875–1880)
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Rimbaud / Life / Travels (1875–1880)
caption_attribution_description: English: Arthur Rimbaud standing in front of a tree in Harar.Français&#160;: Arthur Rimbaud posant devant un arbre au Harar.
context_page_description: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood he produced the bulk of his literary output, then completely stopped writing literature at the age of 20, after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
  Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, having engaged in a hectic, at-times-violent romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years. After he stopped caring about literature, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant and explorer, until his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell, a precursor to modernist literature.
context_section_description: Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875, in Stuttgart, after Verlaine's release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By then Rimbaud had given up literature in favour of a steady, working life. Some speculate that he was fed up with his former wild living, or that the recklessness itself had been the source of his creativity. Stéphane Mallarmé, in a text about Rimbaud from 1896 (after his death), described him as a "meteor, lit by no other reason than his presence, arising alone then vanishing" who had managed to "surgically remove poetry from himself while still alive". Albert Camus, in L'homme révolté, although he praised Rimbaud's literary works (particularly his later prose works, Une saison en enfer and Illuminations — "he is the poet of revolt, and the greatest"), wrote a scathing account of his resignation from literature — and revolt itself — in his later life, claiming that there is nothing to admire, nothing noble or even genuinely adventurous, in a man who committed a "spiritual suicide", became a "bourgeois traficker" and consented to the materialistic order of things.
  After studying several languages (german, italian, spanish), he went on to travel extensively in Europe, mostly on foot. In May 1876 he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Colonial Army to get free passage to Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Four months later he deserted and fled into the jungle. He managed to return incognito to France by ship; as a deserter he would have faced a Dutch firing squad had he been caught.
  In December 1878, Rimbaud journeyed to Larnaca in Cyprus, where he worked for a construction company as a stone quarry foreman. In May of the following year he had to leave Cyprus because of a fever, which on his return to France was diagnosed as typhoid.
caption: Rimbaud (self-portrait) in Harar in 1883.[61]
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