The tragic and romantic Emile Nelligan is Quebec's most beloved and admired poet. One could say that the whole of the French-Canadian sensibility lives under his shadow. Called the Canadian Rimbaud because of his dramatic and short-lived literary career (he wrote his approximately 160 poems between the ages of sixteen and nineteen), Nelligan ushered the poetry of Quebec into the modern age. Attracted by the Parnassian and symbolist movements of France and Belgium, he threw off the tired old subjects of patriotism, "le terroir" (the soil), the glories of old France, and the theme of fidelity to the land, language, and religion of French Catholic Quebec to explore unusual symbols, the melodies and symbolic possibilities of language, and, most striking of all, the dark recesses of his own inner being and tormented soul. Instead of clichéd celebrations of the land and ancestors, he spun out the webs...