Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)
Arthur Rimbaud was the teenage prodigy who detonated modern poetry and then walked away before his twentieth birthday. Born in a small French town to a devout mother and absent father, he fled to Paris during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War, where his hallucinatory verses and scandalous affair with poet Paul Verlaine made him both legend and pariah. In just a few feverish years he wrote The Drunken Boat, A Season in Hell, and Illuminations; works that reshaped language itself and foreshadowed everything from surrealism to punk. This episode asks what his vanishing act reveals about our own obsession with permanence: why we believe art, life, and love must last to matter, and what it might mean to burn brightly and let the fire go out.
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