A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat | Arthur Rimbaud

New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bilingual edition of Rimbaud's A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat — a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from "the examination of his own depths."

Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions's edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and it quickly became a classic. Rimbaud's famous poem "The Drunken Boat" was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as "the first punk" — a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry.

This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig-designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel and now National Book Award-winner Patti Smith. 

About the Author

Poet of logical revolts, of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks, conceptual artists and punks, Arthur Rimbaud wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. His career lasted all of five years, between 1870-1875, toward the end of which he wrote his most famous poems in prose, Une Saison en enfer (A SEASON IN HELL, Green Landtern Press, 2010) and Illuminations. He is the author of FESTIVALS OF PATIENCE: THE VERSE POEMS OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD (Kenning Editions, 2021).

Louise Varese was an American biographer and translator of French. She is known for her translations of Stendhal, Proust, Georges Simenon, Julien Gracq, St.-John Perse and Arthur Rimbaud.

Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Her seminal album Horses, bearing Robert Mapplethorpe's renowned photograph, has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time. Her books include M Train, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.