A Season in Hell

He remembers his life once as a feast where every heart lay open and the wine never stopped, then he sits Beauty on his knees, finds her bitter, and curses her. That is how Rimbaud opens the reckoning that follows: nine chapters begun that spring and finished after his lover Paul Verlaine shot him through the wrist in a Brussels hotel room that same summer, their affair in ruins. He calls himself pagan, beast, damned; he stages his own descent into a hell built from pride and drugs, then turns and renounces the very sorcery, his own dazzling early verse, that had made him a prodigy at sixteen. He paid to have it printed, then never collected the copies; they sat unclaimed in a Brussels warehouse for thirty years while their author walked into the desert and never wrote another line. What he left behind ends not in despair but in a command that has outlived him: one must be absolutely modern.