“Rimbaud was pure dynamite . . . he restored literature to life.” — Henry Miller

“The best edition in English” — Montreal Gazette

“Visionary . . . Wicked . . . A Genius.” — The New Yorker

“The hallucinatory prose-poems of Arthur Rimbaud rank among the glories of 19th-century French literature.” — New York Times

“Paul Schmidt has wavered--no, has hovered--between solicitude and critique, and the result of such suspension is his beautiful, daring, careful work . . . serves us the Rimbaud that matters in its fine mesh.” — Richard Howard, Pulitzer Prize-winner poet and translator; professor, Columbia University

“This collection is interesting for the light it casts on the background to the writing of ‘A Season in Hell’ and the poems later referred to (by Paul Verlaine) as ‘The Illuminations’. As well as the poems themselves, Schmidt includes transcriptions of letters (to Verlaine and others) and biographical details from the life of this most nihilistic genius.” — The Guardian

“A mystic in the wild state.” — Paul Claudel