Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell

Rimbaud Eyes - Dum Dum Girls

Tr. Spa-Eng. from a review in Shvoong by Umberto Tosso

 The disturbing character of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) got, many years ago and definitely, into the category of myths. His teenager figure turns from the depths of time against us, insulting us, contorted by the anger that stirred in his spirit, offering a unique picture of what the author understands as literature. 

 At nineteen he changed his work rebellious, revolutionary and visionary for an adventurous life. It is when he stopped writing, but even then he was the author who had found more ways for his expression. Paul Claudel would say "A Season in Hell is the work of a mystic in the wild".
 What was the truth about Rimbaud? Was he a man of letters, a sighted person, an anarchist, a huckster, a mystic, a bohemian, a drunkard? Verlaine wrote: «Mortel, ange et demon, autant dire Rimbaud ...». 

 But perhaps neither angel nor devil but simply a man, with all his grandeur and all the misery that it entails and that in him were displayed enlarged by the intensity with which he lived through. And in the end, perhaps the only thing you can say about him is what God Aubonne in  Arthur Rimbaud, that unknown:

        «Rimbaud, as a man, son of Valerie Cuif, author of the work that we know, 

        was neither a slave trader nor the young hero who gunned against Versailles 

        people. His life, as his work, reflects the contradiction of a spirit not 

        clairvoyant but lucid and brilliant, that of a generous-hearted young bourgeois 

        son of a soldier, belonging to an austere family in northern France and who died 

        at 37»

 It will not be me who add one more interpretation to the thousand existing on A Season in Hell. Moreover, I think the reader will appreciate it if I give him/her some interesting facts from the only book that Rimbaud agreed to publish: Price: 1 franc. Circulation: 500 copies. Printer: Typographique Alliance (Brussels, 1873).