ALBERT

See also:

• VICTOR
• VICTOR, GAIUS JULIUS (4th cent. A.D.)
• VICTOR, SEXTUS AURELIUS

VICTOR

See also:

• ALBERT VICTOR SAMAIN (1858-1900)

SAMAIN (1858-1900)  , French poet, was born at Lille on the 4th of April 1858 . He was educated at the lycee of that town, and on leaving it entered a bank as a clerk . .He enjoyed no literary associations, and his talent developed slowly in solitude . About 1884 Samain went to Paris, having obtained a clerkship in the Prefecture de la Seine, which he held for most of his life . He presently began to send poems to the Mercure de France, and these attracted attention . In 1893 he allowed a friend to print his earliest volume of poems, Au Jardin de l'inJante, in a very small edition . This led to the sudden recognition of his talent, and to applause from critics of widely different schools . In 1897 this book was reprinted in a more popular form, with the addition of a section entitled L'Urne penchee . Samain's second volume, Aux }lanes du vase, appeared in 1898 . His health began to fail and he withdrew to the country, where he died, in the neighbourhood of the village of Magny-les-Hameaux, on the 18th of August 1900 . A third volume of his poems, Le Chariot d'or, appeared after his death, with a lyrical drama, Polypheme (1901), which was produced at the Theatre de l'cEuvre in 1904 . The fame of Samain rapidly advanced when he was dead, and the general public awakened to the fact that this isolated writer was a poet of rare originality .

He cultivated a delicate, languid beauty of imagery and an exquisite sense of verbal

melody without attempting any revolution in prosody or identifying himself with any theory . Samain had no great range of talent, nor was he ambitious of many effects . Samain's natural life was patiently spent in squalid conditions; he escaped from them into an imaginative world of the most exquisite refinement . He has been compared to Watteau and Schumann; in his own art he bore some resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, and to the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy . See also R . Doumic, Trois Poems," in the Revue des deux mondes (Oct . 19o0); L . Bocquet, Albert Samain, sa vie, son teuvre (1905); and E . W . Gosse, French Profiles (1905) . (E .