"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
A collection of Essays by French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud who had an incredible influence on the theatre.
Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years confined in mental facilities but continued to write, producing some of his finest poetry during the final three years of his life, according to biographer Susan Sontag. "Not until the great outburst of writing in the period between 1945 and 1948 . . . did Artaud, by then indifferent to the idea of poetry as a closed lyric statement, find a long-breathed voice that was adequate to the range of his imaginative needs—a voice that was free of established forms and open-ended, like the poetry of [Ezra] Pound." However, Sontag, other biographers, and reviewers agree that Artaud's primary influence was on the theater. According to Sontag, Artaud "has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud."