Une Saison en Enfer
French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) dates itself April through August 1873, but these are dates of completion. He wrote the book in a farmhouse in Roche, Ardennes. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, for example the Surrealists. According to some interpretations and views, his first sojourn in London in late 1872 and early '73 converted him from an imbiber of absinthe to a smoker of opium, as witness the contrast between the hallucinogenic scope of the Saison's second chapter, "Mauvais Sang" ("Bad Blood") and even the most hashishin of his immediately preceding Paris verses. Its third chapter, "Nuit de l'Enfer" ("literally "Night of Hell"), then exhibits a refinement of sensibility that could possibly be interpreted as conditioned by narcotic withdrawal, which appears to have taken him by surprise. The two sections of chapter four apply this sensibility in professional and personal confession; and then, slowly but surely, at age 19, he begins to think clearly about his real future; the introductory chapter being a product of this later phase (see Starkie biography).
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