The importance of Gilles Hénault and his role as a pioneer of the surreal in Quebec literature no longer need to be demonstrated. Along with Claude Gauvreau, Paul-Marie Lapointe, and Roland Giguère, he was one of the first to introduce automatic writing and the surrealist aesthetic into French-Canadian poetry during the 1940s; he was also among the first to signal the direction that contemporary Quebec poets were to follow. Hénault wrote works of protest and demands for social justice, poems of dissent which influenced not only the generation of Hexagone writers during the 1950s, but the poets of the 1960s and 1970s as well. He set the example of a poet who did not confine himself to writing in a vacuum but who ventured into the world.

Joseph-Paul-Gilles-Robert Hénault, the son of Octavien and Edouardine Joyal Hénault, was...