I first tried to read French symbolist/surrealist poet Arthur Rimbaud in my early 20s when I was closer in age to the age he wrote "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," "Illuminations," and other poems, and at that time I struggled to comprehend Rimbaud's verse (read in English translations).
Older and more patient with dislocation, dissociation, disintegration, and dissatisfaction with one's society, I appreciate Rimbaud more now.
Just finished "A Season in Hell," full of anguish and obvious youthful rebellion against a very constricted life. His mother sounds like a bat out of hell; he was obviously haunted by his Catholicism and its intolerance of the dark side which poets often need to confront (devils, witches, sin): the boy was ready to blow rural France. He quit writing early in his career, lived an adventurous life running guns and doing other bad things in Africa, and having mad affairs. Yet, the poet's life must become superfluous to the poems themselves, and "A Season in Hell" is worth reading for its raw energetic "yawp," especially if you need a vessel to contain your own dissatisfactions and disappointments. Here is poet as exorcist.
