A Season in Hell Themes

We know from Rimbaud's biography that he wrote "A Season in Hell" while getting over a bad break-up with fellow French poet Paul Verlaine. (Check out "In a Nutshell" for more deets.) So it's kind o...

The speaker of "A Season in Hell" has got a lot to say about religion, and Christianity specifically. Since he sees himself in, you know, hell, you can imagine that most of what he says isn't all t...

Rimbaud and company had many fans in the literary world, but maybe the biggest of them all were the Beats. Beat poets, like Allen Ginsberg, shared his fondness for free verse, surreal imagery, and...

You would think a guy who's got it in for Christianity would be more of a science nut, right? After all, faith and reason are often put on opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. That's not wh...

There's no two ways around this: the speaker of "A Season in Hell" is just a wee bit racist. OK, so maybe he's a lot racist. In his hurry to reject Western civilization, he turns to some very essen...