Enduring icon of creativity, authenticity, and rebellion, and the subject of numerous new biographies, Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most repeatedly scrutinized literary figures of the last half-century. Yet almost thirty years have elapsed without a major new translation of his writings. Remedying this state of affairs is Rimbaud Complete, the first and only truly complete edition of Rimbaud’s work in English, translated, edited, and introduced by Wyatt Mason.

Mason draws on a century of Rimbaud scholarship to choreograph a superbly clear-eyed presentation of the poet’s works. He arranges Rimbaud’s writing chronologically, based on the latest manuscript evidence, so readers can experience the famously teenaged poet’s rapid evolution, from the lyricism of “Sensation” to the groundbreaking early modernism of A Season in Hell.

In fifty pages of previously untranslated material, including award-winning early verses, all the fragmentary poems, a fascinating early draft of A Season in Hell, a school notebook, and multiple manuscript versions of the important poem “O saisons, ô chateaux,” Rimbaud Complete displays facets of the poet unknown to American readers. And in his Introduction, Mason revisits the Rimbaud myth, addresses the state of disarray in which the poet left his work, and illuminates the intricacies of the translator’s art.

Mason has harnessed the precision and power of the poet’s rapidly changing voice: from the delicate music of a poem such as “Crows” to the mature dissonance of the Illuminations, Rimbaud Complete unveils this essential poet for a new generation of readers.


From the Hardcover edition.

One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade, Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbaud's life depend on one main source for information--his own correspondence--a complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now.
A moving document of decline, Rimbaud's letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our expectations. Rimbaud--presented by many biographers as a bohemian wild man--is unveiled as "diligent in his pursuit of his goals . . . wildly, soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything."
"I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud" is the second and final volume in Mason's authoritative presentation of Rimbaud's writings. Called by Edward Hirsch "the definitive translation for our time," Mason's first volume, "Rimbaud Complete" (Modern Library, 2002), brought Rimbaud's poetry and prose into vivid focus. In "I Promise to Be Good," Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of Rimbaud. "These letters," he writes, "are proofs in all their variety--of impudence and precocity, of tenderness and rage--for the existence of Arthur Rimbaud." "I Promise to Be Good" allows English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most extraordinary poets in history.

"From the Hardcover edition."