Rimbaud
Graham Robb
Picador £20, pp562
Buy it at BOL

One of the nice things about Graham Robb's superb biography of Rimbaud is that it reminds you that, when it comes to shocking behaviour, our present-day bohemians are lightweights. Our poets write thousand-line epics about the Millennium Dome; Damien drops his trousers in the Groucho; Tracey gets drunk and tells everyone that she wants her mum; our rock stars Just Say No to everything but a cup of cocoa and an early night.

They have no idea. In 1871, the preferred hang-out of the 16-year-old Rimbaud was a café called the Dead Rat. One evening, a bored Rimbaud put sulphuric acid in his friend Charles Cros's drink while he was in the loo. They were always stabbing each other without provocation, sometimes seriously, but it's the last incident which makes you wonder what you had to do to be barred from the Dead Rat. Fed up with the artist Forain's praise of paint as a medium, Rimbaud dropped his trousers, shat on the table and started to draw in this 'powerful impasto'.

Rimbaud's story remains utterly incredible. Born into a poor provincial family, he was performing feats of prodigious intelligence by his early teens. Poetry came quickly, but it was quite unlike the usual productions of the prodigious teenage poet; it showed, from the start, a complete mastery of French classical forms and prosody, combined with an alarmingly original style. No one could have seen what Rimbaud was doing, because it was completely unprecedented and unimaginable; a schoolboy somehow writing some of the greatest masterpieces of French poetry.

The poetry is hard to describe and exhilarating, mad, exhausting in effect. 'Le Bateau Ivre' and 'Ce Qu'on Dit Au Poete' are alarming poems, following a train of thought without self-consciousness, a stream of images constrained, it seems, only by the classical perfection of the verse. You can hardly ever hear any kind of influence; 'Chercheuses de poux' is surely meant as a parody of Baudelaire, not a homage to him. Poets are made by what they read, but nothing will help you come to the 'Vowels' sonnet; it is as unprecedented as the 'Sonnet to the Arsehole'. As for the two little books with which Rimbaud concluded his life's work, the Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations, there is nothing like them in world literature, and there never will be.

At 15, Rimbaud had done with Charleville, the dreary little town where he grew up, and set off to Paris. What followed has been told many times, but remains fascinating; he attracted the attention of Paul Verlaine by sending him five of his lewdest poems, and quickly moved in with the elder poet and his wife. A short seduction followed; it was part of Rimbaud's plan to persuade Verlaine to spend vast amounts of money, drink implausible amounts of absinthe and copulate ceaselessly (Rimbaud took the passive role; he said that Verlaine was too dirty to bugger, though Rimbaud, who hardly bathed more than twice a year, could hardly have presented a very inviting prospect himself).

Almost incredible amounts of bad behaviour followed. Verlaine's marriage broke down; the pair fled to Brussels and then London. Their idea of a quiet night in was to stab each other with kitchen knives wrapped in towels, so as not actually to kill each other, followed by an energetic bout of sodomy. London suited Rimbaud; he was one of nature's émigrés, and the fogs, the secrecy and the odd, disorderly language started to work their way into his poetry. Les Illuminations is full of English idioms, literally translated, and we know from Verlaine's transliteration that the title is pronounced in an English accent, Illuminécheunes.

Given the fecundity and inventiveness of Rimbaud's last poems, what followed remains almost incredible. He gave up and, after the age of 21, never wrote again. Instead, he went to Africa where, according to Robb, he became a hard-headed and successful trader, dealing in anything from guns to slaves. He grew out of literature, as he had always expected to grow out of Europe. He only returned to die, aged 36, just as his poetic reputation was growing to colossal proportions. Auden said that he dreamt of a 'truth acceptable to lying men'; it would be more accurate to say, after reading, slack-jawed, the oeuvres poétiques, that Rimbaud represents a glorious and radiantly deplorable set of lies, thrown in the face of the habitually truthful.

In one sense, Rimbaud is a biographer's dream; it is the most extraordinary story, and it practically tells itself. But in another, more practical aspect, he is a complete nightmare. We know some surprising things about him, such as (thanks to a Brussels police report) the appearance of his penis ('short and not very voluminous') and anus ('can be dilated quite markedly'). More obviously interesting things remain obscure. His life was so rackety that there are long periods when he quite simply disappears. The second half of his life was spent in a largely unmapped Africa where he tried to conceal his business dealings and how much money he was making. He disappeared for weeks and months at a time, sleeping rough and leaving no record.

He wrote everything so young that hardly anyone who met him thought of making the sort of useful, respectful record of his conversation which a biographer needs; his fame was posthumous. Poems, letters, documentation were lost, and may still surface; someone saw a suitcase of manuscripts in Africa after the Second World War, which has now disappeared.

Robb has written a marvellous biography, which pieces all this together from scraps of evidence. He has the right qualifications; he sees how fine the poetry is and how loathsome Rimbaud must have been. He can be drily amusing at the expense of Rimbaud and his often embarrassing biographers, while never entertaining doubts about the value of the poetry. It's rare for a biographer to have more than one really good biography in him; by his third, passionate involvement has generally given way to a sense of duty.

By following his sensationally good lives of Balzac and Hugo with this unforgettably truthful Rimbaud, Robb elevates himself into the Hilary Spurling class. It has one virtue which, though it was never of much interest to his subject, is quite indispensable to a great biographer; it is always tactful.