Selected Poems and Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (Penguin Classics Series) »

Arthur Rimbaud (1854—1891) is one of France's most controversial and influential poets, though he gave up his career at a young age.
Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, a translator, and journalist.
John Sturrock is consulting editor for the London Review of Books, a literary critic, travel writer, and translator of, among other works, Sodom and Gomorrah by Proust (forthcoming from Penguin Classics).

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 when he 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 (1873), and letters that unveil the man who turned his back on poetry.