Arthur Rimbaud #BOTD 1854 (d. 1891) was a French poet known for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. He started writing at a very young age but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War.

During his late adolescence and early adulthood Rimbaud 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 his retirement, Rimbaud 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.

"Come from forever, and you will go everywhere."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"A thousand
Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays." ~ A. Rimbaud

"Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

“On the blue summer evenings,
I will go along the paths,
And walk over the short grass,
as I am pricked by the wheat:
Daydreaming
I will feel the coolness on my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head.
I will not speak, I will have no thoughts...”

"... I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer...The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to...A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything..."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent"
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea"
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"You feel on your lips a kiss
Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life."
~ Arthur Rimbaud

"A thousand Dreams within me softly burn"
~ Arthur Rimbaud