Like Arthur Rimbaud, Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, created enigmatic texts notable for their youthful energy and startling images drawn from the demon-haunted regions of the unconscious. The parallel extends further, as both wrote in the same genre, the prose poem--brought to prominence by Louis Bertrand, Maurice de Guérin, Charles Baudelaire, and Pierre Louÿs--and were major influences on what has become the dominant mode in twentieth-century French poetry, Surrealism. Lautréamont left little information about his short life. A few, mostly approximate, dates and anecdotes of often dubious accuracy cast only a shadowy light on the brief but prolific career of one of the notable poets of the nineteenth century.

Isidore Lucien Ducasse, later known as Comte de Lautréamont, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 4 April 1846. He was the only child of François Ducasse, a French...