Saint-Pol-roux

Saint-Pol-roux (pseud. of Paul Roux) (1861-1940). French Symbolist poet, friend of Mallarmé. Between 1893 and 1907 he published three volumes of prose poems, Les Reposoirs de la procession. His verse play La Dame à la faulx (1899) is the best expression of his conviction that ‘le Drame est l'expression capitale de la Poésie’. Having moved to Brittany in 1898, he withdrew more and more from the world of letters. The Surrealists, however, hailed him as ‘le Maître de l'image’ and ‘le seul authentique précurseur du mouvement dit moderne’. He continued to write, but much of his life's work was destroyed when his manor-house at Camaret was pillaged in 1940.

[Keith Aspley]