Antoine Girard, sieur de Saint-Amant (September 30, 1594December 29, 1661) was a French
poet.
Saint-Amant was born near
Rouen
Rouen (, ; or ) is a city on the River Seine in northern France. It is the prefecture of the Regions of France, region of Normandy (administrative region), Normandy and the Departments of France, department of Seine-Maritime. Formerly one of ...
. His father was a merchant who had, according to his son's account, been a sailor and had commanded for 22 years "''une escadre de la reine Elizabeth''" – a vague statement that lacks confirmation. The son obtained a
patent of nobility, and attached himself to different great noblemen – the
duc de Retz and the
comte d'Harcourt {{Unreferenced, date=June 2019, bot=noref (GreenC bot)
When the Viking chieftain Rollo obtained via the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte the territories which would later make up Normandy, he distributed them as estates among his main supporters. Amo ...
among others. He saw military service and sojourned at different times in
Italy, in
England – a sojourn which provoked from him a violent poetical attack on the country, ''Albion'' (1643) – in
Poland, where he held a court appointment for two years, and elsewhere. Saint-Amant's later years were spent in France; and he died at
Paris.
Saint-Amant has left a considerable body of poetry. His ''Albion'' and ''Rome ridicule'' set the fashion of the
burlesque
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. poem. In his later years he devoted himself to serious subjects and produced an epic, ''Moyse sauvé'' (1653). His other work consists of Bacchanalian songs, his ''Débauche'' being one of the most remarkable convivial poems of its kind.
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References
* ''Oeuvres'', edited by Jean Lagny, 4 volumes (1967–71). The standard critical edition.
* Robert T. Corum, ''Other Worlds and Other Seas'' (1979). Close formal analysis.
* Edwin M. Duval, ''Poesis and Poetic Tradition in the Early Works of Saint-Amant'' (1981). Intertextual synthesis.
* David Lee Rubin, "Le Mauvais Logement", Chapter 2 of ''The Knot of Artifice'' (1981).
* Catherine Ingold, "Order and Affinity in the Seasonal Sonnets of Saint-Amant" in ''The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of French Lyric Sequences'', edited by Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (1991).
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint-Amant, Antoine Girard De
French poets
Members of the Académie Française
1594 births
1661 deaths
17th-century French writers
17th-century French male writers
French male poets