Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) began his poetic career as a brilliant student at the Collège de Charleville in northern France, a child prodigy with dazzling technical virtuosity. His linguistic and poetic gifts are on display in Ver Erat, a Latin hexameter poem which he wrote for a school exam at age fourteen. Rimbaud went on to revolutionize French poetry in his very brief career; by the age of twenty-one, he had renounced poetry and left France.