Adolphe Retté's Misty Thule, originally published in 1891 and here translated into English for the first time by Brian Stable-ford, is one of the key documents of the Symbolist Movement, and one of the most extreme illustrations of its philosophy. Deliberately breaking the usually-imposed boundaries of poetry and prose, sensation and fantasy, stories and chapters, syntax and punctuation, it can be seen at once as a collection in the tradition of Charles Baudelaire's unfinished Spleen de Paris, an avant-garde novel, and a work of Surrealism avant la lettre, reaching toward an immediacy of raw representation that attempts to gag the censor of rationalization and liberate the anarchic thrust of the unconscious as a hidden participant in the processes of perception and mental response.Although Retté repudiated the book in later life, on religious grounds, Misty Thule remains the most remarkable work that he produced--and, indeed, one of the most remarkable that anyone produced under the aegis of Symbolism.