Poems traditionally gather the texts Rimbaud wrote from January 1870 to mid-September 1871. He fair-copied the first fifteen ones in October 1870 and gathered them in a collection given to the young poet Paul Demeny (The collection known as of Douai). He then attached to them seven other poems he had written when he was in Belgium, that is to say a whole of 22 poems. In those texts, Rimbaud respects the rhyme, uses the alexandrine and favours the sonnet. They contain reminiscences of his readings and some are even true pastiches of other poets like Alfred de Musset or Victor Hugo.

The poems that he wrote after he run away several times, when back to Charleville, changed of style. It is the beginning of a period of rejection of Family, social order, Religion, and the experience of the poet as a "seer", of which he exposed the theory in a letter to Paul Demeny written in May 15, 1871. One month later, he was sending him another letter, asking him to burn, "like the last will of a dead" all the verse that he was enough stupid to give him during his stay in Douai, because he was judging them outmoded.

In August 1871, Arthur sent a lot of his new poems to Paul Verlaine (The Stolen Heart, Those Who Sit, My Little Lovelies, Paris is Repeopled...), then he wrote the Drunken Boat before his departure to join Verlaine in Paris.

The change of style and his psychological evolution are found in every poems he wrote: he passed from the imitation of Parnassians and Romantic Poets to a "New Literature", by a loss of values and references and found a language which "will be from the soul for the soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colours".