Arthur Rimbaud wrote nearly all of his poems before he was twenty. He was a schoolboy genius from Charleville, in northeastern France, who ran away to Paris, scandalized it in the company of the poet Paul Verlaine, and turned French poetry inside out with “The Drunken Boat,” A Season in Hell and the prose poems of Illuminations. Then, at about twenty, he stopped. As far as anyone knows, he never wrote another poem.

What came next is one of the strangest second lives in literature. Rimbaud walked across Europe, joined the Dutch colonial army and deserted in Java, worked as a foreman in a quarry on Cyprus, and finally went to Aden, on the Red Sea, and then to Harar, in what is now Ethiopia. There he became a trader in coffee, hides and, eventually, guns. His letters home from Africa are about prices, caravans and money. They never mention poetry.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, his poems were becoming famous without him. Verlaine wrote about him as one of the “accursed poets” in 1884, and published Illuminations in 1886, and young poets began to treat Rimbaud as a legend. He seems to have known little about it, and to have cared less.

In early 1891, a pain in his right knee grew so bad that he couldn’t walk. He was carried on a stretcher across the desert to the coast, and sailed for France. In Marseille, at the Hôpital de la Conception, surgeons amputated his leg. The diagnosis was cancer. He went home to his family’s farm for the summer, then tried to return to Africa, and got no farther than Marseille.

His sister Isabelle stayed at his bedside through his last weeks. He died on November 10, 1891, at the age of 37, and was buried in Charleville, the town he had spent his youth trying to escape. His poems, written by a boy, have never stopped sounding young.