Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud ( or ; ; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet born in
Charleville, Ardennes. He influenced modern literature and arts, and prefigured
surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age, while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his teens (17–20). The critic Cecil Arthur Hackett wrote that his "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes".