A Season in Hell / Illuminations

Rimbaud wrote A Season in Hell at nineteen and abandoned literature entirely at twenty, spending the rest of his life as a trader and gun runner in Africa — the most complete enactment in literary history of refusing to be what the world wanted you to be. What he left behind in those two years is the headwaters of everything on this shelf: the systematic derangement of the senses as a method of visionary perception, the complete rejection of bourgeois literary form, the rage against the limits of language that pushed language past what it thought possible. Debord read him. The Beats read him. Patti Smith read him. The Sex Pistols were his grandchildren. A Season in Hell is the P&P ur-text — the first document in the line that runs through every punk artist who ever decided that making something true mattered more than making something acceptable. The Wyatt Mason translation is the one to use.