News at Eleven: In one exercise, he plagiarized a translation

Lucretius by Sully Prudhomme, but considerably improved it in the process. In another, he fashioned a subtly erotic evocation of the graceful young carpenter of Nazareth from a bland poem whose author, says Guyaux, has not been identified. (It was a Vendean poet called Eugène Mordret, who had published "Le Christ à la scie" in the prestigious Revue contemporaine.) The "scholâ" changed, but Rimbaud continued to write poems as though they were exercises. Even the notorious "Sonnet du trou du cul" was a cunning pastiche of another poet, a technically irreproachable example of the traditional blason enumerating a lover's charms.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Rimbaud in the Pléiade

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