Arthur Rimbaud reshaped French poetry before he was old enough to buy a drink, then walked away from literature entirely and spent the rest of his 37 years trading coffee, ivory and outdated rifles in Yemen and Ethiopia. This episode explores that bifurcated life, beginning in provincial Charleville with an absent army-captain father and a rigid, hyper-religious mother who withheld meals over botched Latin recitations. We follow the prize-winning student who at nine declared he wanted to live without a conventional job, and who used the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War to run away to Paris.

We break down his seer philosophy and the deliberate derangement of the senses, the drifting-boat poem that tore down the Alexandrine, the toxic relationship with Paul Verlaine that ended with a gunshot in a Brussels hotel, and the prose-poetry breakthrough of A Season in Hell. Then the disappearance: enlisting in the Dutch colonial army just to reach Java and deserting into the jungle, running a stone quarry in Cyprus, exporting Harar coffee, befriending Ras Makonnen, and the disastrous rifle deal with King Menelik II. The episode closes with the bone cancer misdiagnosed as arthritis, the amputation in Marseille, and the symbolists and surrealists who built on poems he never knew were famous.

• The Charleville pressure cooker: an absent father and the mouth of darkness
• Sulfuric acid, muddy boots and why Paris eventually exiled Rimbaud and Verlaine
• Why literary critics take a 16-year-old’s seer letters seriously
• Java, Cyprus, Aden and Harar: the merchant years nobody in Africa knew about
• The influence on Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and the question of letting go of past success