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A Season in Hell (French : Une saison en enfer) is an extended poem in prose written and published in 1873 by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, including the Surrealists.
Rimbaud began writing the poem in April 1873 during a visit to his family's farm in Roche, near Charleville on the French-Belgian border. According to Bertrand Mathieu, Rimbaud wrote the work in a dilapidated barn. [1] : p.1 In the following weeks, Rimbaud traveled with poet Paul Verlaine through Belgium and to London again. They had begun a complicated relationship in spring 1872, and they quarreled frequently. [2]
Verlaine had bouts of suicidal behavior and drunkenness. When Rimbaud announced he planned to leave while they were staying in Brussels in July 1873, Verlaine fired two shots from his revolver, wounding Rimbaud once. After subsequent threats of violence, Verlaine was arrested and incarcerated to two years hard labour. After their parting, Rimbaud returned home to complete the work and published A Season in Hell. However, when his reputation was marred because of his actions with Verlaine, he received negative reviews and was snubbed by Parisian art and literary circles. In anger, Rimbaud burned his manuscripts and likely never wrote poetry again.[ dubious – discuss ]
According to some sources,[ who? ] Rimbaud's first stay in London in September 1872 converted him from an imbiber of absinthe to a smoker of opium, and drinker of gin and beer. According to biographer Graham Robb, this began "as an attempt to explain why some of his [Rimbaud's] poems are so hard to understand, especially when sober". [3] The poem was by Rimbaud himself dated April through August 1873, but these are dates of completion. He finished the work in a farmhouse in Roche, Ardennes.
The prose poem is loosely divided into nine parts, of varying length. They differ markedly in tone and narrative comprehensibility. However, it is a well and deliberately edited and revised text. This becomes clear if one compares the final version with the earlier versions. [4]
Bernard Mathieu describes A Season in Hell as "a terribly enigmatic poem", and a "brilliantly near-hysterical quarrel between the poet and his 'other'." [1] : p.1 He identifies two voices at work in the surreal narrative: "the two separate parts of Rimbaud's schizoid personality—the 'I' who is a seer/poet and the 'I' who is the incredibly hard-nosed widow Rimbaud's peasant son. One voice is wildly in love with the miracle of light and childhood, the other finds all these literary shenanigans rather damnable and 'idiotic'." [1] : pp.1–2
For Wallace Fowlie writing in the introduction to his 1966 University of Chicago (pub) translation, "the ultimate lesson" of this "complex"(p4) and "troublesome"(p5) text states that "poetry is one way by which life may be changed and renewed. Poetry is one possible stage in a life process. Within the limits of man's fate, the poet's language is able to express his existence although it is not able to create it."(p5) [6] According to Mathieu: "The trouble with A Season in Hell is that it points only one way: where it's going is where it's coming from. Its greatest source of frustration, like that of every important poem, is the realization that it's impossible for any of us to escape the set limits imposed on us by 'reality'." [1] : p.2 Wallace in 1966, p5 of above-quoted work, "...(a season in Hell) testif(ies) to a modern revolt, and the kind of liberation which follows revolt".
Academic critics[ who? ] have arrived at many varied and often entirely incompatible conclusions as to what meaning and philosophy may or may not be contained in the text.
Among them, Henry Miller was important in introducing Rimbaud to the United States in the 1960s. [7] He published an English translation of the book and wrote an extended essay on Rimbaud and A Season in Hell titled The Time of the Assassins. It was published by James Laughlin's New Directions, the first American publisher of Rimbaud's Illuminations.
During one of her lengthy hospitalizations in Switzerland, Zelda Fitzgerald translated Une Saison en Enfer. Earlier Zelda had learned French on her own, by buying a French dictionary and painstakingly reading Raymond Radiguet's Le bal du Comte d'Orgel .[ need quotation to verify ]
Wallace Fowlie translated the poem for his Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters in 1966. [8]
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism.
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
Tristan Corbière, born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 29. He was a French poet, close to Symbolism, and a figure of the "cursed poet".
Illuminations is an incomplete suite of prose poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, first published partially in La Vogue, a Paris literary review, in May–June 1886. The texts were reprinted in book form in October 1886 by Les publications de La Vogue under the title Les Illuminations proposed by the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's former lover. In his preface, Verlaine explained that the title was based on the English word illuminations, in the sense of coloured plates, and a sub-title that Rimbaud had already given the work. Verlaine dated its composition between 1873 and 1875.
Le Bateau ivre is a 100-line verse-poem written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud. The poem describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism. It is considered a masterpiece of French Symbolism.
19th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. The period covered spans the following political regimes: Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X (1814–1830), the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
A Season in Hell is a poetic work by Arthur Rimbaud.
The American Night is a volume of poetry written by Jim Morrison, front-man for the 1960s psychedelic rock group the Doors, and published posthumously in 1991, 20 years after his death by Random House under the trade name imprint Villard Publishing. The book is structured into 10 sections. The title is eponymous with a poem that appears on the album An American Prayer, itself a collection of spoken word and musical vignettes released in 1978.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Chuffilly-Roche is a commune in the Ardennes department in northern France. It was created, in 1828, by amalgamating the communes of Chuffilly-et-Coigny and Roche-et-Méry.
Christoforos Liontakis was an award-winning Greek poet and translator. He read law at the University of Athens and philosophy of law at the Sorbonne, in Paris. His first collection of poems was published in 1973.
Claude Jeancolas was a French writer, art historian, and journalist. He is best known for his work on Arthur Rimbaud.
Wallace Fowlie (1908–1998) was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. Although he published more than twenty books, he was devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature. He took his A.B. at Harvard College in 1930 followed by a Master's in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1936, also at Harvard. Before coming to Duke in 1964, he taught at Bennington College, University of Chicago, and Yale University.
Soleil et chair is a poem written by Arthur Rimbaud in May 1870. The work, while being unmistakably Rimbaud, nevertheless exhibits the influence that both Romanticism and Latin writers such as Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius had on his early style. It takes the tone of a hymn to the sun and earth—with overt sexual overtones—which periodically lapses into a lament of the abyss that now separates Man from Nature. Throughout, double entendres figure widely, often providing the sexual innuendos. The poem, which consists of four sections, is written in Alexandrins, or 12-syllable lines—typical to French verse in the same way that iambic pentameter is to English. In spite of its relatively classical form, the direct nature of its venereal themes sounds shockingly modern to even today's reader; moreover, the sheer creativity of Rimbaud's imagery would seem to presage his later refinement of this stylistic trait, which has since earned him the title of Visionary.
Une saison en enfer is Léo Ferré's last studio album. It sets into music the whole eponymous poem written in 1873 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The album was released in 1991 by EPM Musique, for the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death, both as double LP and CD. It was reissued in 2000 by Ferré's son's label La Mémoire et la Mer, under a new cover.
A Season in Hell is a 1971 French-Italian drama film directed by Nelo Risi. The film tells the life and death of the poet Arthur Rimbaud and his troubled relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine until the African adventure in Ethiopia.
Ernest Delahaye (1853–1930) was a French writer and essayist. He maintained a long and close friendship with Arthur Rimbaud whom he first met in April 1865 when they attended school together in Charleville in the Ardennes region of France. He and Rimbaud had a shared interest in poetry, and he would help Rimbaud by making fair copies of his drafts for distribution to Rimbaud's literary friends. He was one of the few (seven) recipients of the privately printed A Season in Hell, though Rimbaud later asked for it back to give it to someone else. According to Rimbaud biographer, Charles Nicholl, Rimbaud's "[last] strictly dateable poem" was contained in a letter to Delahaye of 14 October 1875. Through Rimbaud, Delahaye also met poet Paul Verlaine and became friendly with him. Verlaine wrote a poem - Sonnet Boiteux - which is dedicated to him. Delahaye mixed his civil service career, working at the Education Ministry, with writing biographical material on both Rimbaud and Verlaine, contributing first-hand accounts of the poets' lives and families.
Paterne Berrichon, the pseudonym of Pierre-Eugène Dufour was a French poet, painter, sculptor and designer. He is best known as husband of Isabelle Rimbaud, and the brother-in-law and publisher of Arthur Rimbaud.
The Spiritual Hunt is a prose poem purportedly written by French writer Arthur Rimbaud, claimed to be his masterpiece by his friend and lover Paul Verlaine. Supposedly strongly resembling in form the only book he published during his lifetime, A Season in Hell, the poem is considered to be one of the most famous lost artworks, despite the fact that in 1949, a twelve-page work by the same title was unveiled to the public by Pascal Pia; Rimbaud scholars, almost unanimously, have denounced this poem as a literary forgery.
"Voyelles" or "Vowels" is a sonnet in alexandrines by Arthur Rimbaud, written in 1871 but first published in 1883. Its theme is the different characters of the vowels, which it associates with those of colours. It has become one of the most studied poems in the French language, provoking very diverse interpretations.
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