Gilles Hénault
Gilles Hénault was a notable Canadian poet and literary figure, born on August 1, 1920, in Saint-Majorique, Quebec. He emerged as an inspiration for avant-garde poets during the mid-20th century. His early education was interrupted by the Great Depression, but he later pursued studies in social science at the Université de Montréal. Hénault began his literary career as a reporter for Le Jour, where he also published his first poems. His breakthrough came with the publication of "L'Invention de la roué" in 1941, which drew inspiration from Symbolist poetry.
Throughout his career, he explored themes of social change and the connection between humanity and nature, influenced by existentialist thought and automatic writing techniques. Hénault was involved in labor unions and briefly affiliated with the Canadian Communist Party, experiences that shaped his poetic themes. His works, including "Théâtre en plein air" and "Signaux pour les voyants," challenged the status quo and introduced innovative poetic forms. Hénault’s contributions to literature were recognized with several awards, including the Prix du Grand Jury des Lettres and the General Governor's Award. He passed away in 1996, leaving a lasting legacy in Quebec’s literary landscape.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Gilles Hénault
Writer
- Born: August 1, 1920
- Birthplace: Saint-Majorique, Quebec, Canada
- Died: October 6, 1996
- Place of death: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Biography
Joseph-Paul-Gilles-Robert Hénault, inspiration to avant-garde poets of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s, was born August 1, 1920, in Saint-Majorique, Quebec, Canada, to Octavien Hénault and Edouardine Joyal Hénault. The working-class family relocated to nearby Montreal when he was still a child. Hénault began his undergraduate work via scholarship at the College Mont-Saint-Louis, where he excelled in the sciences, but the Depression derailed his academic career. Eventually he returned to Univerisité de Montréal to take courses in social science.
Hénault spent much of his unemployed time in the Montreal City Library reading late nineteenth century Symbolist poetry. He became a reporter for the daily Le Jour in the late 1930’s, approximately the time this same newspaper published his first poems. His breakthrough poem, “L’Invention de la roué,” inspired in particular by Paul Valery’s poetry, was published in La Nouvelle Relève in 1941. Hénault also wrote for Le Canada and La Presse as well as Radio Canada. He married, and his oldest son was born in 1943.
As World War II progressed, Hénault published poems, features, and columns in Le Nouvelle Relève, Amérique Française, and Gants du ciel. He added the existentialist theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Eluard to his early influences. He met art critics such as Paul-Emile Borduas, a leading automatist painter, and he experimented with automatic writing in his poetry. In 1946, along with Eloi de Grandmont, Hénault founded his own publishing house, Les Cahiers de la File Indienne. That same year, it published his first collection of poetry, Théâtre en plein air.
Hénault worked with many labor unions, but his affiliation with the Canadian Communist Party (1946-50) raised official hackles. Between 1949 and 1956, he worked for miners’ unions in Northern Ontario. Both experiences influenced the theme of his work: overthrow of the status quo for all men, Quebec Canadians in particular. In 1957, Hénault began a two-year stint as an art critic for various periodicals. In 1959, he became literary and art editor at Le Devoir and, in 1961, a foreign-policy columnist for Le Nouveau Journal.
Théatre en plen air shook the world of Quebec poetry by introducing automatic writing and the unconscious as a force in shaping the language of a poem. The work is also a manifesto for sweeping change that rejected the artificial, civilized world for the natural, primal world. Hénault’s vision developed in “Dix poemes de dissidence,” written from 1945 to 1949 and 1959 to 1963 and collected in Signaux pour les voyants. The poems work toward a union of man and nature as in the physical labor of the mine workers. Totems (1953) presents the writer as subversive, and Voyage au pays de mémoire (1959) explores utopia.
Hénault’s long poem, Sémaphore (1962), won the Prix du Grand Jury des Lettres. In 1966, Hénault became director of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and five years later he became museum adviser to the Department of Cultural Affairs. His next collection of poems, Signaux pour les voyants (1972) won a General Governor’s Award. In 1993, three years before his death, he won the David Prize.