Arthur Rimbaud wrote nearly all of his poetry between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and then he stopped, and never seems to have looked back. In those five or six years he changed what poems could do.

He was born in Charleville, a town in the Ardennes in northeastern France, and raised by a strict mother after his father, an army officer, left the family. He was a brilliant, prize-winning student, and by sixteen he was running away to Paris and writing poems of startling force. In 1871 he sent some to the poet Paul Verlaine, who wrote back inviting him to come. Rimbaud arrived in Paris carrying “The Drunken Boat,” a poem told by a boat that has lost its crew and drifts out into wild, visionary seas. He had never seen the ocean.

That same year he wrote two letters setting out what he wanted poetry to become. The poet, he said, must make himself a “seer” through a long, deliberate disordering of all the senses. One phrase from them is still quoted everywhere: “I is another.”

His affair with Verlaine, who was ten years older and married, was stormy and very public. It ended in Brussels in 1873, when Verlaine, drunk, shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sent to prison for two years. That year Rimbaud finished A Season in Hell, a prose poem of confession and rage, and paid a Brussels printer to publish it. Most copies were never collected and were only found in the printer’s storeroom in 1901. His other great work, the prose poems of Illuminations, was published in 1886 while he was far away and probably unaware of it.

Rimbaud spent his twenties wandering: he enlisted in the Dutch colonial army and deserted, then worked in Cyprus, and finally settled as a trader in Aden and in Harar, in what is now Ethiopia, dealing in coffee and, for a time, guns. In 1891 a tumor in his right knee forced him home. His leg was amputated in Marseille, and he died there in November, at thirty-seven. Generations of poets, from the Surrealists to Patti Smith, have treated him as a patron saint.