Saint-Pol-Roux
Encyclopedia
Paul-Pierre Roux, called Saint-Pol-Roux (15 January 1861, quartier de Saint-Henry, Marseille
- 18 October 1940, Brest
) was a French
Symbolist
poet
.
, but mysteriously ended his studies there. He then wrote some plays under his own name.
. He particularly frequented the salon
of Stéphane Mallarmé
, for whom he had the greatest admiration. He won a certain notoriety, trying out several pseudonyms before finally becoming "Saint-Pol-Roux le magnifique". He even got one of his plays, la Dame à la faux, put on by Sarah Bernhardt
, and was interviewed by Jules Huret
as a member of the Symbolist movement. He perhaps participated in the Rosicrucian
aesthetic of Péladan
. Nevertheless, he wrote nothing on the movement or on its founder. Saint-Pol-Roux was doubtless interested in this audacious literary attempt, and had to leave it quickly.
, in Finistère
, where their daughter Divine was born. After his father's death, he moved to Camaret
and made Britanny the center of gravity for his work.
Living off the profits of revenue from his opera libretto for Louise, he bought a house overlooking the ocean, above the Pen Had beach, on the road to pointe de Pen Hir and transformed it into a manor in the Baroque style. He named it the manoir de Coecilian, after his son's name, or sometimes manoir des Boultous. He wrote "Facing the sea, man is closer to God" ("Face à la mer, l'homme est plus près de Dieu"). He welcomed several artists and writers, notably Louis-Ferdinand Céline
, who looked up to him as an ancestor, and even Jean Moulin
, then sous-préfet de Châteaulin, who visited in 1930.
Saint-Pol-Roux was a member of the académie Mallarmé
from 1937 to 1940.
The following month, Louis Aragon
published an article on the poet's "assassination," as he called it - "Saint-Pol Roux, ou L'Espoir" - in the journal Poésie. It was the first article published by Aragon after the fall of France, and was censored by the Vichy
authorities.
Saint-Pol-Roux is the archetypal "forgotten poet". It was under this title that he was a dedicatee of André Breton
's Clair de Terre (also dedicated to "ceux qui comme lui s'offrent le magnifique plaisir de se faire oublier (sic)", or "those who like him offered themselves the great pleasure of making themselves forgotten"), and Vercors
's Le Silence de la mer
( calling him "le poète assassiné", or "the assassinated poet").
Saint-Pol-Roux equally created the notion of "idéoréalisme". He desired an artistic fusion between the real world and the world of ideas, in a Neoplatonic perspective. He imagined a cosmology
in which Beauty - lost in the real world - has to be revealed by the poet.
Under the name Saint-Pol-Roux
Posthumously published
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
- 18 October 1940, Brest
Brest, France
Brest is a city in the Finistère department in Brittany in northwestern France. Located in a sheltered position not far from the western tip of the Breton peninsula, and the western extremity of metropolitan France, Brest is an important harbour and the second French military port after Toulon...
) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
.
Marseille
He was born to a middle class family in Marseille where his father was an industrialist. He studied in a lycée in LyonLyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....
, but mysteriously ended his studies there. He then wrote some plays under his own name.
Years in Paris
He left the south of France to instal himself in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. He particularly frequented the salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
of Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, for whom he had the greatest admiration. He won a certain notoriety, trying out several pseudonyms before finally becoming "Saint-Pol-Roux le magnifique". He even got one of his plays, la Dame à la faux, put on by Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...
, and was interviewed by Jules Huret
Jules Huret
Jules Huret was a French journalist, best known for his interviews with writers.-Life:...
as a member of the Symbolist movement. He perhaps participated in the Rosicrucian
Rosicrucian
Rosicrucianism is a philosophical secret society, said to have been founded in late medieval Germany by Christian Rosenkreuz. It holds a doctrine or theology "built on esoteric truths of the ancient past", which, "concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe...
aesthetic of Péladan
Joséphin Péladan
Joséphin Péladan was a French novelist and Martinist. His father was a journalist who had written on prophecies, and professed a philosophic-occult Catholicism.-Biography:...
. Nevertheless, he wrote nothing on the movement or on its founder. Saint-Pol-Roux was doubtless interested in this audacious literary attempt, and had to leave it quickly.
Voluntary exile
Saint-Pol-Roux quit Paris in 1898, having quickly come to hate it for his being ostracised and for the mediocrity of the literary criticism circles, ignoring it with as much pride as he himself had been ignored. On a clairvoyant's advice, and also to escape his creditors, he left, firstly for the Ardennes. There he settled with his wife in RoscanvelRoscanvel
Roscanvel is a commune in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-western France.-Population:Inhabitants of Roscanvel are called in French Roscanvelistes.-See also:*Quélern*Communes of the Finistère department...
, in Finistère
Finistère
Finistère is a département of France, in the extreme west of Brittany.-History:The name Finistère derives from the Latin Finis Terræ, meaning end of the earth, and may be compared with Land's End on the opposite side of the English Channel...
, where their daughter Divine was born. After his father's death, he moved to Camaret
Camaret-sur-Mer
Camaret-sur-Mer is a commune in the Finistère department in northwestern France, located at the end of Crozon peninsula.-Sights:Camaret-sur-Mer is home to the Tour Vauban or Tour dorée , a historic fortification guarding the harbor and built in 1669-94...
and made Britanny the center of gravity for his work.
Living off the profits of revenue from his opera libretto for Louise, he bought a house overlooking the ocean, above the Pen Had beach, on the road to pointe de Pen Hir and transformed it into a manor in the Baroque style. He named it the manoir de Coecilian, after his son's name, or sometimes manoir des Boultous. He wrote "Facing the sea, man is closer to God" ("Face à la mer, l'homme est plus près de Dieu"). He welcomed several artists and writers, notably Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
, who looked up to him as an ancestor, and even Jean Moulin
Jean Moulin
Jean Moulin was a high-profile member of the French Resistance during World War II. He is remembered today as an emblem of the Resistance primarily due to his role in unifying the French resistance under de Gaulle and his courage and death at the hands of the Germans.-Before the war:Moulin was...
, then sous-préfet de Châteaulin, who visited in 1930.
Saint-Pol-Roux was a member of the académie Mallarmé
Académie Mallarmé
The Académie Mallarmé is a French literary academy of writers and poets, founded in 1937. Since 1976, the Académie has awarded the Prix Mallarmé literary prize at the Brive book fair....
from 1937 to 1940.
Death
During the night of 22 to 23 June 1940, a drunk German soldier invaded the manor, killed the family's faithful governess, raped Saint-Pol-Roux's daughter Divine and seriously injured her in the leg with a revolver bullet. Saint-Pol-Roux miraculous escaped death in the incident but was later taken to hospital in Brest on October 14, where he died of a broken heart when he heard that the manor had burned down with his unpublished manuscripts inside.The following month, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
published an article on the poet's "assassination," as he called it - "Saint-Pol Roux, ou L'Espoir" - in the journal Poésie. It was the first article published by Aragon after the fall of France, and was censored by the Vichy
Vichy
Vichy is a commune in the department of Allier in Auvergne in central France. It belongs to the historic province of Bourbonnais.It is known as a spa and resort town and was the de facto capital of Vichy France during the World War II Nazi German occupation from 1940 to 1944.The town's inhabitants...
authorities.
A forgotten poet
On the Liberation, Divine tried in vain to ensure that her father's works were not forgotten. It is in large part down to the salvage work, editing and publication of editions of his work by Rougerie during those years of what she called "purgatory" that his poems, essays and plays have escaped Nazi barbarism to be edited and re-edited anew. A considerable number of unedited manuscripts (Le Trésor de l'Homme, La Répoétique) survived the pillaging.Saint-Pol-Roux is the archetypal "forgotten poet". It was under this title that he was a dedicatee of André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
's Clair de Terre (also dedicated to "ceux qui comme lui s'offrent le magnifique plaisir de se faire oublier (sic)", or "those who like him offered themselves the great pleasure of making themselves forgotten"), and Vercors
Jean Bruller
Jean Marcel Bruller was a French writer and illustrator who co-founded Les Éditions de Minuit with Pierre de Lescure and Yvonne Paraf. During the World War II occupation of northern France he joined the Resistance and his texts were published under the pseudonym Vercors.Several of his novels have...
's Le Silence de la mer
Le Silence de la mer
Le Silence de la mer is a novel written in early 1942 by Jean Bruller under the pseudonym Vercors. It was published secretly in Nazi-occupied Paris...
( calling him "le poète assassiné", or "the assassinated poet").
Corpus
Saint-Pol-Roux attempted to create a total work of art. This dream of Symbolist literature consisted of creating a perfect work responding to all the senses. Saint-Pol-Roux himself was therefore very interested in plays and operas, during his Parisian years. At the end of his life, he filled himself with wonder at the artistic possibilities offered by the cinema.Saint-Pol-Roux equally created the notion of "idéoréalisme". He desired an artistic fusion between the real world and the world of ideas, in a Neoplatonic perspective. He imagined a cosmology
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
in which Beauty - lost in the real world - has to be revealed by the poet.
Works
Under the name Paul Roux- Maman!, Ollendorff, 1883
- Garçon d'honneur, Ollendorff, 1883
- Le Poète, Ghio, 1883
- Un drôle de mort, Ghio, 1884
- Rêve de duchesse, Ghio, 1884
- La Ferme, Ghio, 1886
Under the name Saint-Pol-Roux
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol 1., Mercure de France, 1893
- L'Épilogue des saisons humaines, Mercure de France 1893
- La Dame à la faux, Mercure de France, 1899
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. I : La Rose et les épines du chemin, Mercure de France, 1901
- Anciennetés, Mercure de France, 1903
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. II : De la colombe au corbeau par le paon, Mercure de France, 1904
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. III : Les Féeries intérieures, Mercure de France, 1907
- Les Fééries intérieures, 1907
- La Mort du Berger, Broulet, Brest, 1938, 69 p.
- La Supplique du Christ, 1939.
Posthumously published
- Bretagne est Univers, Broulet, Brest, 1941
- Florilège Saint-Pol-Roux, L'Amitié par le Livre, 1943
- Anciennetés, Seuil, 1946
- L'Ancienne à la coiffe innombrable, Éd. du Fleuve, Nantes, 1946
- Août, Broder, 1958
- Saint-Pol-Roux "Les plus belles pages", Mercure de France, 1966
- Le Trésor de l'homme, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1970
- La Répoétique, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1971
- Cinéma vivant, , Rougerie, Mortemart, 1972
- Vitesse, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1973
- Les Traditions de l'avenir, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1974
- Saint-Pol-Roux / Victor SegalenVictor SegalenVictor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic....
, Correspondance, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1975 - La Transfiguration de la guerre, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1976
- Genèses, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1976
- La Randonnée, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1977
- De l'art magnifique, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1978
- La Dame à la faulx, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1979
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. I : La Rose et les épines du chemin, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1980
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. II : De la colombe au corbeau par le paon, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1980
- Les Reposoirs de la procession, vol. III : Les Féeries intérieures, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1981
- Le Tragique dans l'homme, vol. I : Les Personnages de l'individu, Les Saisons humaines, Tristan la Vie, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1983
- Le Tragique dans l'homme, vol. II : Monodrames, L'Âme noire du prieur blanc, Fumier, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1984
- Tablettes. 1885-1895, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1986
- Idéoréalités. 1895-1914, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1987
- Glorifications. 1914-1930, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1992
- Vendanges, Rougerie, Mortemart, 1993
- La Besace du solitaire, Rougerie, Mortemart, 2000 ISBN 2856680658
- Les Ombres tutélaires, Rougerie, Mortemart, 2005 ISBN 2856681123