Which poet wrote 'Les Chants de Maldoror', a key influence on surrealism?

The poet who wrote Les Chants de Maldoror was Comte de Lautréamont. The name was the pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, a French-Uruguayan writer whose extraordinary prose poem became a major precursor to Surrealism.

Ducasse wrote the work in the late 1860s. It is divided into six cantos and follows the dark, elusive figure of Maldoror through episodes filled with violence, blasphemy, metamorphosis, strange animals, and grotesque humor. Its deliberately shocking imagery and abrupt combinations of ideas challenged conventional literary taste.

The work was initially obscure, but French avant-garde writers rediscovered it in the early twentieth century. Philippe Soupault encountered it in 1917, and André Breton, Louis Aragon, and other Surrealists soon embraced its dreamlike logic and radical language. Breton treated Lautréamont as a prophetic predecessor of the movement.

The author should not be confused with the book’s character: Comte de Lautréamont is Ducasse’s pen name, while Maldoror is the central fictional figure. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud influenced modern poetry, but they did not write this work.