The Poet Assassinated

 There are men who cannot bring themselves to conform with the rest of human society, who cannot conceive of a secure and honorable career even at the hands of a tolerant age. They flee, they are eternally escaping from the fold by some particularly outrageous or suicidal action. Rimbaud having mastered the art of poetry in his twenties, deserted literature to lead caravans through the African desert. Apollinaire at almost as early an age had also mastered the traditional forms of his art, but with Rimbaud's example before him could not become "an explorer, a trapper, a robber, a hunter, a miner."