Selected Poems and Letters / Arthur Rimbaud

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.