Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud remains one of the strangest figures in literature, writing his visionary and often chaotic poetry while still practically a teenager. Reading him today still creates unsettling atmosphere of fever dreams, rebellion and spiritual decay. Unlike polished classical poets, Rimbaud often sounds fragmented, hallucinatory and violent, but beneath that there is strange melancholy and desire to escape ordinary reality.

Perhaps what makes him still modern is that his poetry feels dangerous and unstable, almost like psychological noir. After abandoning literature completely, becoming traveller and trader in africa, rimbaud turned himself into myth as much as poet.

While some later writers imitated only his chaos and self-destruction, his best poetry still possesses haunting beauty and dreamlike imagery difficult to forget.