Selected Poems and Letters

‘I know dusk
And dawn, rising like a multitude of doves.
What men have only thought they’d seen, I’ve seen’

Arthur Rimbaud was one of the wildest, most uncompromising poets of his age, although his brief literary career was over by the time he was twenty-one and he soon embarked on a new life as a trader in Africa. This edition brings together his extraordinary poetry and more than a hundred of his letters, most of them written after he had abandoned literature. A master of French verse forms, the young Rimbaud set out to transform his art, and language itself, by a systematic ‘disordering of all the senses’, often with the aid of alcohol and drugs. The result is a highly innovative, modern body of work, obscene and lyrical by turns – a rigorous journey to extremes.

Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock’s new translation includes Rimbaud’s greatest verse, as well as his record of youthful torment, A Season in Hell, while the African letters unveil a portrait of the man who turned his back on poetry. The edition also includes an introduction examining Rimbaud’s two very different careers.