Arthur Rimbaud reshaped French poetry before he was old enough to buy a drink, then walked away from literature entirely and spent the rest of his 37 years trading coffee, ivory and outdated rifles in Yemen and Ethiopia. This episode explores that bifurcated life, beginning in provincial Charleville with an absent army-captain father and a rigid, hyper-religious mother who withheld meals over botched Latin recitations. We follow the prize-winning student who at nine declared he wanted to live without a conventional job, and who used the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War to run away to Paris.

We break down his seer philosophy and the deliberate derangement of the senses, the drifting-boat poem that tore down the Alexandrine, the toxic relationship with Paul Verlaine that ended with a gunshot in a Brussels hotel, and the prose-poetry breakthro ...