A Season in Hell [and] The Illuminations

Tight, square, uncreased spine has some heavy sunning. Clean, unmarked interior. Price to back cover has been blacked out. Very little shelf-wear otherwise. 'The Poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense and reasoned deranging of all his senses,' wrote Rimbaud in his famous 'Lettre du voyant' to Paul Demeny. 'All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.' The original French appears on each verso of this omnibus containing two of Rimbaud's trailblazing works, along with their English translations by Enid Rhodes Peschel on the facing rectos. Includes a generously illustrated foreword by Henri Peyre, featuring renderings of the young poet by Picasso, Paul Verlaine, his sister Isabelle, and his friend Ernest Delahaye (who was given one of the seven original privately printed copies of A Season in Hell, although Rimbaud later asked for its return so that he could give it to someone else), as well as a diabolical cover design by Tim Gaydos utilizing chicly expressionistic display type. 181 pp.