Arthur Rimbaud wrote the poems that were eventually published under the title Illuminations between the ages of seventeen and twenty. John Ashbery, who has just translated the forty-two poems (plus one fragment) traditionally grouped under that title, is eighty-three. Rimbaud, when he wrote the poems, was at a peak of creativity, moving from formal poetic composition to his long prose confession A Season in Hell (1873), and into the form—the prose poem—with which he is most often associated.
