ARTHUR RIMBAUD, the enfant terrible of French 19th-century poetry and outcast from Parisian literary life, was unaware that his final work, "Illuminations", was ever published. He was thought to be dead. In fact, by the time it came out in 1886, Rimbaud had given up poetry to be a trader in Africa, a "first-rate Arabist". He spoke a variety of local languages and dialects, and moved perpetually from place to place just as, years before, he and his lover, Paul Verlaine, also a poet, had gone back and forth between Paris and London.
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