A Season in Hell

About this book

A young poet looks back upon a season of spiritual and emotional ruin. His voice turns from defiance to remorse, from visions of freedom to the sensation of being trapped inside his own experiment.

Arthur Rimbaud's prose poems move through drunkenness, religion, revolt and fierce self-examination. The sections carry titles such as Bad Blood and Delirium, but their language resists the tidy order those headings suggest. The book is brief and often disorienting, giving the reader the experience of a mind trying to survive its own extremes.

J. Sibley Watson’s translation appeared in The Dial in July 1920.