French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) dates itself April through August 1873, but these are dates of completion. He finished the work in a farmhouse in Roche, Ardennes. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, for example the Surrealists. According to some sources, Rimbaud's first stay in London in late 1872 and early 1873 converted him from an imbiber of absinthe to a smoker of opium. According to biographer, Graham Robb, this began "as an attempt to explain why some of his [Rimbaud's] poems are so hard to understand, especially when sober". There is a marked contrast between the hallucinogenic quality of Saison's second chapter, Mauvais Sang ("Bad Blood") and even the most hashish-influenced of the immediately preceding verses he wrote in Paris. Its third chapter, Nuit de l'Enfer (literally "Night of Hell"), then exhibits a refinement of sensibility. The two sections of chapter four apply this sensibility in professional and personal confession; and then, slowly but surely, at age 19, he begins to think clearly about his real future; the introductory chapter being a [ - ]

French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) dates itself April through... [ + ]