Rimbaud Quit Poetry Forever at 21
Quick answer: Arthur Rimbaud wrote all his poetry between 15 and 20, then quit forever to trade coffee in Africa. What poetry's most famous quitter can teach writers.
In the autumn of 1873, a nineteen year old walked out of a Brussels printing house and left nearly the whole run of his new book behind because he could not pay the bill. The book was A Season in Hell. The teenager was Arthur Rimbaud, and this was the only book he would ever publish himself. Most of the copies sat forgotten in a storeroom for almost thirty years. Within two years of that afternoon he had stopped writing poetry entirely, and he never started again.
Rimbaud is the strangest case in literary history: total genius followed by total renunciation. Everything he wrote, he wrote roughly between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Then came silence, deliberate and final, for the rest of his short life. His story is usually told as a tragedy. It is more useful, and more uncomfortable, to read it as a question aimed straight at you: what is your writing actually for, and what happens if it fails to deliver?
A schoolboy who planned to remake poetry
Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, a small town in northern France that he loathed with real energy. He was a prize-winning student, fluent in Latin verse, raised by a stern and devout mother after his father left. When war broke out in 1870 he began running away, first towards Paris, once ending up briefly in a cell because he had no train ticket. He was fifteen and already writing poems that unsettled his teachers.
In May 1871 he set out his programme in two letters now known as the seer letters. The poet, he argued, must make himself a visionary through a long and deliberate derangement of all the senses. One of them contains a sentence still quoted in classrooms: I is another. A few months later he sent poems to Paul Verlaine, then a rising Parisian poet, whose reply, as famously reported, urged the dear great soul to come. Rimbaud arrived in Paris at sixteen carrying The Drunken Boat, a hundred lines of hallucinated sea voyage that remain among the most astonishing poems in French.
The wreck in Brussels
Paris did not go well, or rather it went too well. Literary society found the boy filthy, rude and terrifyingly gifted. Verlaine abandoned his young wife and infant son, and the two poets lived rough in London through 1872 and 1873, quarrelling, reconciling, running out of money. In July 1873, in a Brussels hotel room, a drunk and desperate Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the left wrist. Verlaine was arrested and served two years in prison. Rimbaud, aged eighteen, went home to his family's farm to recover.
There he finished A Season in Hell, a short, savage prose confession that reads like a man interrogating his own gift. He took it to a Brussels printer, could not settle the account, and the edition mostly stayed in storage. There were no reviews worth the name. His sister later claimed he burned papers at the farm that autumn; the story is contested, but the mood it captures is not.
Two more years, then the door closed
Rimbaud did not stop instantly. Through 1874 he was in London again, fair-copying the prose poems that became Illuminations. By 1875, when he handed a bundle of manuscripts to Verlaine in Stuttgart, he was done. What followed looks like a man trying to outrun his own biography: he studied languages, crossed the Alps on foot, enlisted in the Dutch colonial army for the signing bounty and deserted within weeks in Java, then worked as a quarry foreman on Cyprus.
In 1880 he reached Aden, on the Arabian coast, and took a job with a coffee trading firm. Soon he was running its outpost in Harar, in what is now Ethiopia, dealing in coffee and hides. One venture, an arms deal in 1886 and 1887, is well documented and cost him money and the better part of a year. His letters home from this period survive in quantity. They discuss invoices, engineering manuals, the heat, and his savings. They do not discuss poetry.
Fame arrived and he did not answer
While Rimbaud weighed coffee in Harar, Verlaine made him famous. An 1883 essay series called The Cursed Poets introduced his work to a new generation, and in 1886 the Paris journal La Vogue printed Illuminations, presenting the author as the late Arthur Rimbaud. He was alive, thirty one, and running a trading post. Some word of his growing legend appears to have reached him; his surviving correspondence shows no flicker of interest. He never corrected the record, never claimed the acclaim, never sent a new line.
In early 1891 a tumour in his right knee forced him back to France. His leg was amputated in Marseille in May. He died there on 10 November 1891, aged thirty seven, with the symbolist movement he had accidentally fathered in full flower a train ride away.
What the walking away can teach you
Rimbaud is not a model. He is a mirror. He demanded that poetry transform existence itself, and when it delivered only poems, he refused the consolation prize of a literary career. If your ambition is so absolute that anything short of transfiguration counts as failure, his life shows where that road ends: in silence, not serenity. It helps to separate two loves that feel identical from the inside, the love of writing and the love of what writing might get you. Rimbaud lost the second and let it drag down the first.
Where to start reading him
Begin with The Drunken Boat and the sonnet Vowels, then read A Season in Hell in one sitting, which is how it works best. Illuminations rewards slower visits; its prose poems practically invented a register poets still borrow. If you can, use a facing-page edition, because even schoolbook French lets you hear the drive of the originals. Reading him young is electrifying; reading him after thirty is stranger and better, because you start to notice how much control underlies the apparent chaos.
What poets can take from this
- Write down what you honestly expect writing to give you; unexamined expectations are what burn writers out.
- Keep dated copies of everything and let at least one trusted reader hold your work, as Verlaine held Rimbaud's.
- Treat a season of silence as a fallow field, not a verdict, and announce nothing.
- Study The Drunken Boat for how wild imagery rides strict metre: abandon in the images, order in the frame.
- If a project fails publicly, finish grieving it before deciding what it means about you.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of a vessel that has lost its pilot, a boat, a kite, a riderless horse, and let it decide in the final lines whether it wants to be steered again.
Questions
Why did Rimbaud stop writing poetry?
He never explained, so no one knows for certain. The likeliest reading combines exhaustion after the Verlaine disaster, the flat reception of A Season in Hell, and a restless hunger for money and movement that poetry could not satisfy. The silence was clearly deliberate: he had chances to return and never took them.
Did Rimbaud know he had become famous?
Partly. Verlaine published and praised his work in the 1880s while Rimbaud was trading in Harar, and some news of it appears to have reached him. His surviving letters show no interest in the subject, and he never responded to the acclaim.
How old was Rimbaud when he died?
He died at thirty seven, in Marseille in November 1891, of cancer, months after his right leg was amputated. All of his poetry had been written before he turned twenty one.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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