The Spiritual Hunt
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The Spiritual Hunt (French: La Chasse spirituelle) is a prose poem purportedly written by French writer Arthur Rimbaud, claimed to be his masterpiece by his friend and lover Paul Verlaine.[1] Supposedly strongly resembling in form the only book he published during his lifetime, A Season in Hell, the poem is considered to be one of the most famous lost artworks, despite the fact that in 1949, a twelve-page[2] work by the same title was unveiled to the public by Pascal Pia; Rimbaud scholars, almost unanimously, have denounced this poem as a literary forgery.
The poem was first mentioned by Paul Verlaine, who claimed to have forgotten its manuscript back with his wife Mathilde in Paris, after leaving the capital for Brussels to reunite with Rimbaud in July 1873. Since it was around this time that Mathilde discovered Rimbaud's "obscene and sexual letters" to Verlaine,[1] Jacques Bienvenu has tried to demonstrate that Verlaine may have even invented the existence of the poem, wanting to subsequently present Rimbaud's letters as a work of fiction.[3] Even though Edmund White believes that the poem had, in fact, existed and that Mathilde destroyed it along with the letters – but not before using them to win her lawsuit for separation from Verlaine in 1874 – he notes that "[i]n his overvaluation of this lost text, Verlaine seems clearly to have been what we might now call a drama queen; he couldn't remember a single line from it later, or even its title."[1]