A Season in Hell

A prose-poem collection by Arthur Rimbaud, published in 1873, recounting a spiritual and artistic crisis through visionary, autobiographical writing.

Arthur Rimbaud: A French poet whose radical verse and brief literary career reshaped modern poetry. The collection turns Rimbaud’s personal crisis into an unstable poetic voice.
Une Saison en Enfer: The original French text of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 prose-poem collection. Its French wording reveals the rhythms and ambiguities behind translations.
Brussels shooting incident: The 1873 episode in which Paul Verlaine shot and wounded Arthur Rimbaud in Brussels. The shooting and its aftermath form the immediate biographical backdrop to the work.
Bad Blood (A Season in Hell): The opening prose-poem of A Season in Hell, centered on ancestry, rebellion, and self-condemnation. It begins the speaker’s attempt to understand himself through inherited histories.
Modernist poetry: Poetry associated with modernism, marked by formal experiment and responses to a changing modern world. The collection’s fractured voice and anti-conventional form anticipate later poetic experiments.
Prose poem: A poetic composition written in prose rather than arranged in verse lines. Rimbaud uses prose to carry lyric intensity without conventional lineation.
Delirium I: The Foolish Virgin: A section of A Season in Hell that presents a troubled relationship through a dramatic, unstable voice. It evokes the relationship with Verlaine without settling who speaks or how literally.
Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud: A nineteenth-century literary and romantic relationship marked by collaboration, travel, and conflict. Their shared history informs the collection’s fractured account of love and blame.
Night of Hell: A section of A Season in Hell depicting the speaker’s descent into spiritual and bodily torment. Its visions make the collection’s crisis most explicitly infernal.
Surrealism: An artistic and literary movement that sought to release imagination from rational control. Surrealists later treated Rimbaud’s visions and rebellion as significant precedents.

Linked from 2 pages