"Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.— In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts."
French poet whose innovative and intensely lyrical work transformed modern poetry while he was still a teenager. He is best known for A Season in Hell and Illuminations. Though his literary career was brief, his influence on Symbolist and modernist writing has been profound.