Rimbaud's poetry, written between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, is marked above all by the theme of youth and an irrepressible spirit of revolt. Isolated juvenile figures wander across his colourful stage, the homeless ragamuffins of Les Effarés or the happy-go-lucky vagabond of Ma Bohème, alienated from the world at large and finding their solace in communion with nature and in a private feast of the imagination. In a poem entitled Les Poètes de sept ans, Rimbaud gives the most dramatic image of the nascent child-poet: gritting his teeth against authority and respectable conduct, mixing with forbidden company and finding a kind of contemplative serenity in impurity and social disgrace, turning his frustration into a pleasurable inner vertige, crushing his fists against his eyes to see the turning shapes and colours of his mental kaleidoscope, and feeling the effervescence and inexhaustible richness of the imagination inviting him far more persuasively than the drab surface of so-called reality.

It is only one step from such a portrait to the all-important letter written by Rimbaud in 1871 and known as the Lettre du voyant, in which he expresses his determination to turn himself forcibly into a poetic visionary. His intention, echoing that of Baudelaire to plunge ‘Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau’ and inspired by a similar ennui or soul-destroying disenchantment with the material world, is nevertheless far more revolutionary and systematic.