This is a brilliant encapsulation of the rage of the artist. He has a contempt for mankind, society, it's progress, and yet can't escape society. He can be a "..." as artists where called back then, refuse to live a middle class existence, live a life of drunken debauchery, and yet that is just another societal role.
His imagery is powerful, his language self-deprecating and insanely sincere. It draws you in with its suffering.
At the end he finds his life as an artist, his passion, empty. It all ended with the gunshot to the hand that ended his affair with Verlaine. In short, he equates his artistry and homosexual affairs with hell, and a return to society redemption. This explains how he became a materialist later on in his life, a trader, even considering trading slaves.
It is a sad fate for someone who had such a poetic gift.
I still enjoy reading A Season In Hell, even after having read it many times. Ultimately, the work is flawed; it has a little too much affected insanity, angst, the sign of an adolescent work, but it is also full of pure poetry and promise.

These are the brilliant and mystical hallucinations of the original "enfant terrible" and his visionary raptures about poetry, innocence and guilt. Verbal deliriums suffused with pain and hatred, remorse and desperation, but also with a parodic, pathetic and fatalistic megalomania. The "mystical rage" transformed into pyromaniac wording. Poems in prose, of very high quality, which reflect the fury of the love-hate relationship of Rimbaud with life and Universe.

In the collection of prose poems and verse fragments that make up the short book A Season in Hell, begun in April 1873 in an outbuilding at Rimbaud's family farm at the village of Roche and completed by the end of August, he looks back in despair over his life as a poet. In one of the fragments, titled "Ravings number two" he talks about "the history of one of my follies. I invented the colors of the vowels!" he claims, and goes on: "I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible...to all the senses...I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos...I ended up regarding my mental disorder as sacred."

Rimbaud draws a picture of his affair with Verlaine in cynical terms, painting Verlaine as a weak and foolish virgin and himself as an "infernal bridegroom," a monster of cruelty. It wasn't far from the truth.

The last chapter of A Season in Hell is titled "Farewell." It has an air of exhaustion and relief about it. "I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories. A fine fame as an artist and story-teller swept away! I! I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am given back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and wrinkled reality to embrace. A peasant!" A Season In Hell was finished in August 1873. Rimbaud somehow persuaded his thrifty mother to pay to have the book printed in Belgium. He sent his six author's copies to his friends and to men of letters in Paris. Many people see this manuscript as his farewell to literature. It certainly reads like that, although Enid Starkie believes that it was Rimbaud's farewell to a certain kind of literature--visionary, mystical, growing out of the selfish and hallucinatory lifestyle that had crashed to a halt only a few months before with his shooting and the jailing of Verlaine--and a commitment to something more humble and realistic. "Well, now I shall ask forgiveness for having fed on lies," Rimbaud wrote. He hoped that the French literary world would offer him the forgiveness that he was now prepared to seek, and give his book favorable reviews. He the proceeded to Paris to see how his book had fared.

Favorable reviews? He must have been mad. To those literary men, the dilettantes Rimbaud had mocked and despised a year or two earlier, Rimbaud was the insolent catamite who had destroyed their old friend Verlaine: sponged off him, wrecked his marriage, corrupted his soul and ruined his life, and then, when he had used him up, had turned him in to the police to face hard labour in a Belgian jail.

We have an eyewitness account of Rimbaud on the day when the last door in Paris had been slammed in his face, at the moment when he realized that the literary career he'd embraced so passionately was over. It was the evening of the first of November, 1873, a holiday, and the cafés and restaurants were crowded. The poet Poussin had joined some writer friends at the Café Tabourey. He noticed a young man alone in a corner, staring into space. It was Rimbaud. Poussin went over and offered to buy him a drink. "Rimbaud was pale and even more silent than usual," he later recalled. "His face, indeed his whole bearing, expressed a powerful and fearsome bitterness." For the rest of his life Poussin "retained from that meeting a memory of dread."

When the café closed, Rimbaud--who hadn't spoken to anyone all evening--set out to walk home through the late autumn countryside. It took him about a week. When he got to Charleville he built a bonfire and burned all his manuscripts. He didn't bother to collect the remaining five hundred copies of his book from the printer--they moldered there until they were discovered by a Belgian lawyer in 1901. That should have been the end of it. But Rimbaud couldn't quite let go. The following year in London he carefully copied out his prose poems, gathered together under the title, Illuminations. The year after that he tried to get them published. For the anguished but brilliant Rimbaud, giving up poetry must have been akin to weaning himself from a potent drug.

Highly unreliable. Schmidt has produced some very good English-language poetry, but it ain't Rimbaud. He conceals this by not printing the original on a facing page. Worse yet, he prints the Illuminations as free verse, when they were written as prose poems (on the rationale that the prose poem isn't as successful a genre in English as it is in French.) I am sternly against this kind of translation, unless you're going to go all the way and admit that what you're doing is a poem by Paul Schmidt "after" Rimbaud. But he doesn't. Rimbaud newbies are directed instead to Louise Varese's superb versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell; those who want a complete works should go for Wallace Fowlie's less memorable but more faithful edition; total Rimbaud freaks should learn French (and mortgage the house in order to be able to afford the magnificent Pleiade edition of the originals).

i find the translation quite smooth and literary; however in comparison to other translations, schmidt tends to be overly literal, which is not always helpful and doesn't leave much space for personal interpretation, which is rather important when reading rimbaud. but even if some of the verses' meanings are "forced" onto the reader, the meaning and rhythm are conveyed properly, which makes this book a good read.

I have a collection of various translations by Arthur Rimbaud. This book was a revelation to me. The difference is remarkable. By abandoning precise translations, Schmidt allows the full beauty and vulgarity of these works to be free. There is no stilted translation present here. This book is a work of art. It may not be translation in the traditional sense, but it is its own remarkable undertaking - and I believe it will stand the test of time. Congratulations Mr. Schmidt.

One of the most frustrating, useless, and difficult textbooks I have had in 20 years of school. I'm startled to see favorable reviews of this textbook as it is completely unhelpful as a reference or educational tool for anyone actually trying to learn Mechanics of Materials. The examples are difficult to follow. The text is overbearing. The figures are confusing. An awful textbook.

One of the best reference books to have on the shelf, although some others may be better as course textbooks.

I was searching for a text book dealing with the concepts of Advanced Mechanics of Materials and found the right choice.One can undoubtedtly go ahead in buying this book as it vividly explains the concepts...

This book provides an excellent account of the Mexico city earthquate. Yet what is most poignant about it is that it describes the events through the eyes of the urban poor. IT is very detailed in description, and at times graphic. Some of the accounts are inspiring, while many of them reveal the true nature of the Mexican ruling class. If anyone is interested in urban poor in South America, this book is a must read. It will have you cheering the silent heroism of so many poor Mexicans, while at the same time arousing a feirce anger towards the government that let so many of them down.

The book also conveys to the reader a sense of the magnitude of Mexican city and how devasting the earthquake was. It reveals how the poor are so dramatically affected by such an event, yet how they are so often forgotten. Literally, to the point of death. This is an excellent book.