Miron the Magnificent, as Jacques Brault has called him, may be considered the pivot of Quebec poetry. He has absorbed the work of his precursors into his own; he has served as a catalyst to others through his numerous activities; and he has taken the theory of language as one of his central concerns.

Born to Charles-Auguste (a carpenter) and Jeanne Michaudville Miron in Saint-Agathe-des-Monts in January 1928, he attended primary school there at the college run by the brothers of the Sacred Heart and then took further schooling (with the same order) in Granby, where he lived from 1941 (the year his father died) to 1946. Moving to Montreal in 1947, he undertook various jobs but settled increasingly on a life as a writer, producing poetry and a miscellany of poetry and prose (L'Homme rapaillé, which won the Prix de la Revue Etudes Françaises and the Prix France-Canada...