And that could be because this wildman in his grimy kilt of serge, this Lord of the Dance with his regulation rifle, this holy monk of androgynous demeanour is actually Arthur Rimbaud, freedom-fighter. Whoever he is, this young man on the plinth is so charged with charisma and electricity that he commands the respect of men much older than him. It’s not just that the poet stands on a pedestal while they stand further off.

The second point of interest is that the hard-bitten, middle-distance characters – nasty fellows to a man – all give pride of place to Arthur Rimbaud. But here in the new image that grimace is amplified and intensified. Now for the first time we really see the Rimbaud grimace, echoed by a million rock-stars (from the second Carjat studio-portrait). Only Rimbaud, with his incredibly distinctive lips, downturns his mouth in an iconic scowl. Recovering from the shock of that gaze we register next that almost everyone apart from the young poet is smiling. With a searing gaze the poet looks straight into the camera. We see him dominating a great public space, surrounded by members of the National Guard or possibly by the Paris Irregulars: or both. From these old photographic plates we learn that the poet became nothing less than a juvenile figurehead of revolution. Here we discover explosive and controversial evidence that Rimbaud was radically involved in the Paris Commune.

In these two photographs (by Bruno Braquehais) we see the poet as we have never seen him before. As luck would have it I enlarged one of these old plates and – suddenly – there right in front of me I seemed to see the sacred presence, the most elusive man in belles lettres, Arthur Rimbaud, the man ‘shod with the wind’. Very recently, while researching Rimbaud’s circle of friends in London (all of them political exiles like him) I came across two photographs taken in the Place Vendome at the height of the demographic convulsion which was the Paris Commune. And the third has also seemed insoluble – until now. The first two questions are monolithic difficulties. First, why did he abandon poetry at eighteen when he had almost single-handedly reinvented the art? Second, what was the exact nature of his relationship with his mother, the tight-fisted but highly intelligent woman the poet venomously nicknamed Shadowmouth? And third, what happened to Arthur Rimbaud during the superviolent Paris Commune when, in the spring of 1871, the French capital was in the hands of a revolutionary government for seven weeks? Three major problems exist for Rimbaud studies. Apart from being the modern world’s poet-laureate, Rimbaud becomes in his meteoric life: teenage runaway, Abyssinian explorer, circus manager, angel of deviance, venture capitalist, philosophical freedom-fighter, Gnostic magician, Wandering Jew, pseudonymous mariner, Moslem prophet, African ethnographer, amateur photographer, gun runner, Communard and finally, military deserter. (One can spend three lifetimes reading about the poet.) But Rimbaud’s multiform faces defy analysis. (How to transform your life in twenty-four hours.) Critical texts and biographical studies pour from presses, raise eyebrows, galvanize controversy. His complete oeuvre can be read in a day and a night. There isn’t much work in the Rimbaudian canon. Rimbaud is aerogel, frozen smoke, solid air. Particles of evidence about this damned poet’s life seem to have been collected from the coma of comet Wild 2. The world’s most original modern poet autodestructs so mysteriously and so rapidly that biographers are forced to build his image out of stardust. The burnout of the messianic Arthur Rimbaud makes the mythological fall of Icarus seem more like a minor hang-gliding accident.

Illuminations rimbaud analyse