A Season in Hell / Illuminations
Rimbaud wrote his entire body of work between the ages of 16 and 19, then stopped writing forever and became a gunrunner in Africa. *A Season in Hell* is his self-conducted post-mortem; *Illuminations*, his visionary prose poems, compressed and deliberately disorienting. He defined the program: the poet as "seer" (voyant) who must derange all the senses to access hidden truth. Every avant-garde from Surrealism to punk invokes him.
Adolescent genius comes with adolescent grandiosity, and Rimbaud never had to outgrow either. The prose poems are deliberately unparseable, and whatever they do mean is the first thing translation loses. His program of deranging the senses reads better as legend than on the page, and the legend is what most readers are actually consuming.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
