Paul-Pierre Roux 6.7.1968

Paul-Pierre Roux, called Saint-Pol-Roux (15 January 1861, quartier de Saint-Henry, Marseille - 18 October 1940, Brest) was a French Symbolist poet.

Saint-Pol-Roux is the archetypal "forgotten poet". It was under this title that he was a dedicatee of André Breton's Clair de Terre (also dedicated to "ceux qui comme lui s'offrent le magnifique plaisir de se faire oublier (sic)", or "those who like him offered themselves the great pleasure of making themselves forgotten"), and Vercors's Le Silence de la mer ( calling him "le poète assassiné", or "the assassinated poet").

Saint-Pol-Roux attempted to create a total work of art. This dream of Symbolist literature consisted of creating a perfect work responding to all the senses. Saint-Pol-Roux himself was therefore very interested in plays and operas, during his Parisian years. At the end of his life, he filled himself with wonder at the artistic possibilities offered by the cinema.

Saint-Pol-Roux equally created the notion of "idéoréalisme". He desired an artistic fusion between the real world and the world of ideas, in a Neoplatonic perspective. He imagined a cosmology in which Beauty - lost in the real world - has to be revealed by the poet.