A Season in Hell Analysis

Arthur Rimbaud is known for many things: his precocious career, his tumultuous affair with Paul Verlaine, his love of opium and absinthe, and his use of free verse in his poetry. So it stands to re...

Our speaker's had a tough go of things. Once upon a time, life was all sweetness and light. Now, um, not so much. In the second line of the poem, in fact, he lets us know, "One evening I sat Beauty...

We're all over the map in this one: Gaul, the Swabian plains (20), East, West—you name it. If we had to boil it down, though, we'd say that the best way to describe this setting is "elsewhere." T...

Since we're reading Rimbaud in translation from the original French, you're going to have to take everything in this section with a grain of salt—er, French salt, that is. Maybe it's sprinkled on...

Some poems come at you with titles that are like tricky puzzles, leaving you to scratch your head while pondering their connection to the work itself. If you have a sensitive scalp, though, you're...

As one of the most important members of the Decadent Movement and the French symbolists, Rimbaud and his fellows were known for their emotional intensity. As well, they privileged the power of the...

As the title might suggest, "A Season in Hell" is no picnic. Rimbaud throws multiple poetic forms, surrealist images, and an at-times hysterical speaker at us—and he does it for a couple hundred...

Rimbaud wrote all of his poems in a span of five years, quitting writing at the age of nineteen. So…what have you accomplished? (Source) Rimbaud's mom paid for "A Season in Hell" to be published...

For a poem written about a nasty break-up, in which the speaker fantasizes about all sorts of things, "A Season in Hell" has surprisingly little sex in it. We do have an "infernal Spouse […] who...

De profundis Domine (40)Houri (80)Ecclesiastes(263)The Gauls (13)Joan of Arc (44)Ham (46)Ferdinand (77)Hesperidean (132)Cimmeria (225)Monsieur Prudhomme (252)