Illuminations

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was born in Charleville, Ardennes. His creativity coincided with his turbulent relationship with Paul Verlaine in his late teens. All his poetry was written before he was 21. He gave up writing and began to travel, spending 11 years in the port town Aden in Abyssinia (Yemen). Ill, he returned to France and died of cancer in a Marseilles hospital.John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway; Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, in 2011 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and in 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House. He lived in New York until his death, aged ninety, in 2017.

'Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet, was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards self-destruction with the help of hashish and quantities of alcohol. Rimbaud's most thoroughly modern masterpiece, Illuminations, is now translated by John Ashbury, who brilliantly captures the volume's dizzy-making, metropolitan imagery of subways, viaducts, raised canals and bridges.' Ian Thompson, The Spectator, Books of the Year