Arthur Rimbaud swore off poetry at the age of twenty-one. But in those few years he was writing, the teenaged genius managed not only to astonish and shock his contemporaries, but to earn himself a place in the pantheon of literary greats. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon. Stigmatized for his tumultuous affair with Paul Verlaine, he subsequently exiled himself from bohemian Paris, and ultimately died from an infection contracted while selling coffee and guns in Ethiopia. He was thirty-seven.

Here is no dry, academic chronology that gives you the facts about a long-dead poet. Edmund White feels a deep personal connection with his subject, and to that connection he brings first-rate scholarship as well as a poet’s sensibilities. White delves deep into the young poet’s relationships with his family, his teachers, and his lover Verlaine. He follows the often elusive themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud’s works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.