Comte de Lautréamont

Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born in Uruguay on 4 April 1846 and took the pen name Comte de Lautréamont when he began writing in France. He published *Les Chants de Maldoror* and *Poésies*, then died on 24 November 1870, just past his twenty-fourth birthday. For decades the work sat in obscurity. Then the Surrealists found it—and in Lautréamont's violent, hallucinatory verses they saw a blueprint for everything they wanted poetry to do. The Situationists followed. A poet who barely lived became a corner pillar of modern literature.