A Season in Hell

Any book with a title like this (in French it is called Une Saison en Enfer) already gets full marks from me even if I haven't actually read it, which is actually the case with this book of prose poems by French poet Arthur Rimbaud. I have been reading about the fascinating life (okay, I follow a slightly different definition of "fascinating") that Rimbaud led. Actually the French have a special name for poets of these kinds, poets who abuse themselves and destroy their lives to serve their art, or at least that's what they claim. They call them poete maudits, the accursed poets!

Rimbaud wrote most of the poems, for which he is famous now, even before he turned 20 and then left literature for good, to do things like...going to Africa and trading in guns and slaves, or indulging in homosexual debauchery with a lesser poet Paul Verlaine and generally finding some way to scandalize everybody!

This article from New Yorker summarizes the life of the poet and also elaborates the basic credo with which he wrote poetry:

"I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer. . . . It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. . . . I is someone else” (“Je est un autre”). The second letter, sent to Izambard’s friend Paul Demeny, repeats and elaborates on the soon-to-be-famous pronouncement. “The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it,” Rimbaud wrote. “The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains.”

This article in The Guardian wonders whether to call Rimbaud a satanic angel, pederast assassin or a little toad ! And here is another one.