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’ edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and 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.

The Telegraph takes up from where The Green Huntsman left off with the career of Lucien Leuwen, the fashionable young cavalry officer with “republican” leanings but aristocratic tastes. When his father, an influential banker, places him in a government office, Lucien is quickly involved in a series of intrigues. He is required to assist in the suppression of a murder, fix a provincial election, and to advance the interest of his father’s cabal, carry on a cold-blooded love affair with the most beautiful hostess in Paris. Through Lucien’s eyes, Stendhal uncovers the moral decay of a society in which a failing government keeps itself in power by force and trickery.

Attractive, clever, a cavalry officer and very rich, young Leuwen had everything necessary for happiness and success––everything except belief in himself and the social order of his time. It is the period of King Louis-Philippe, when an induced conservatism was atrophying France after the catacalysm of the Revolution and the glorious illusion that was Napoleon. Here is an historical novel which is the real thing––a portrait without equal of a time, a place, and the way conflicting groups of Frenchmen felt about each other and themselves. Lucien Leuwen comes down from Paris to serve with a regiment garrisoned in the provincial city of Nancy. There, though he is only a rich bourgeois, not of the nobility, he cleverly makes his way into society and dares to fall in love with the blue blood belle of the town. The magic cast by one of France’s greatest novelists transports us completely into the hearts of Lieutenant Leuwen and the beautiful Bathilde de Chasteller as their love affair follows its torturous course.

Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” In his biography of Baudelaire, Lewis Piaget Shanks calls Paris Spleen “the final expression of the poet’s vision of the world, of his melancholia, his idealism, his desperate desire to flee from the prison of his subjectivity, his furious longing to find some escape from the ugliness of modern life. They are the center of his work: absolutely devoid of pose, they explain all the rest of it.” Where Baudelaire treated the same theme both in Paris Spleen and in Flowers of Evil, Enid Starkie finds the prose poems “more mature in conception, containing more harmony in the contrast between the flesh and the spirit.” Several of these “corresponding” poems are given in an appendix to this edition.

The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––“des vertiges, des silences, des nuits.” These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.