The route of a poet

It was in the city of Charleville — “an exceptionally idiotic small provincial town” — that Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854. The tone was set! He shows us his childhood head-on in ‘Les Poètes de sept ans’ (Poets at seven years), a magnificent, ferocious poem expressing his rebellion against his mother. She loved her children, but in her own way. The daughter of a farmer, she was taciturn, like many people of the land, and they lacked tenderness.

Rimbaud’s overflowing imagination led him to crazy dreams: what a contrast between the suffocation, the narrow-mindedness of his family home, the provincial town, and his tumultuous inner life!