Nelligan, Emile (1879–1941)

French-Canadian poet. He wrote all his poetry between the ages of 16 and 20, and spent the last 42 years of his life in lunatic asylums, where he continued writing, but only fragments and revisions of existing work. The elegant rhetoric, passion, and melancholy of his verse, and the tragic story of his life, made him a poetic hero.

Influenced by the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, he was Québec's first ‘modern’ poet.