Rimbaud

but that love between the same sex, even if the persons involved are quite ordinary, because of the very similarity of their natures and the absence of a presupposed difference, is creative and artistic.

Homosexuality, in its highest sense, is founded on intellectualism.

Like many writers of his day (including Marx somewhat earlier), Rimbaud took out a "reader's ticket" at the British Museum.

To those who cherish the image of the blaspheming vagrant who deliberately wrecked his career prospects, this is the unacceptable face of Arthur Rimbaud: an ambitious young writer who repeatedly returned to live with his mother and often induced her to interfere

An English literary friend learned from Rimbaud how to swear in the vilest possible French, and years later this man of letters could astound French visitors with his toe-curling, inventive curses.

They were immediately plunged into the life of Soho, which was so full of French exiles and expatriates that they scarcely had any occasion to practice their English.

One day in January, after Mathilde refused to give Verlaine money for drink, he seized the three-month-old Georges and flung him against the wall. And then he started to choke his wife.
Until now Mathilde had been successfully concealing her husband's brutality from her parents, even though they were all living under the same roof.

Verlaine's young wife, Mathilde, became worried, though she dared not confide her anxiety to her parents

Within a week Banville had asked the miscreant to leave, but only after Rimbaud had smashed the china in his room, soiled the bed sheets with his muddy boots,

Every week he attended a salon frequented by the composers Berlioz and Wagner and the painters Édouard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour and all the Parnassian band, who grew accustomed to Verlaine's habits; when he started drinking absinthe, they made sure to hide the knives.