A poet's descent into the depths of hell and spiritual discovery
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) wrote A Season in Hell at the age of twenty, during a particularly turbulent time in his relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine. In its emotion, images and hallucinations, it is a vibrant record of a tortured soul who, through suffering, arrives at the end of his twisted spiritual path: 'It will now be permitted to me to possess truth in a soul and body.'
A Season in Hell appears in Rimbaud's Collected Poems, published in Penguin Classics.
