Jean
Antoine Le Roy , known as Jean Le Roy , was a French poet born in Quimper on
November 28
, 1894
and dead on April 26
, 1918 in Locre , killed in action during First World War .
Jean
Antoine Le Roy , known as Jean Le Roy , was a French poet born in Quimper on
November 28
, 1894
and dead on April 26
, 1918 in Locre , killed in action during First World War .
Jean Le Roy was the son of Alphonse Le Roy and Marie Ernestine Olgiati. After the death of her husband, a few years after the birth of Jean Le Roy, Marie Ernestine left Brittany with her son to move to Paris. After obtaining his baccalaureate degree in 1913, Jean Le Roy followed for a while studying law, but preferred to devote himself to poetry. In the capital, he met Mireille Havet , who mentioned him in her diary. In 1913, his poems are published for the first time in Les Soirées de Paris , a journal directed by Guillaume Apollinaire . The same year, he published a collection of poems, The Prisoner of the worlds , well received by the critics 1 . Alain Le Grand-Vélin, saw "a very abstract architecture, astonishing, precise and spectacular in space: a very sophisticated universe, composed of lines to infinity" 2 .
Recruited in 1914, Jean Le Roy went to fight in the 37th Infantry Regiment. Passed to the 414th Infantry Regiment, he found the infantry captain René Dupuy, known as René Dalize , writer friend of Apollinaire, and there made the acquaintance of François Bernouard , poet and typographer. He created with them a magazine of trenches , Les Imberbes . In 1916, he distinguished himself in Verdun and received the Croix de Guerre . The following year, during an internship at Saint-Cyr to become an officer, he met Jean Cocteau , with whom he built a strong friendship and began a correspondence. In 1918, he died during fighting on Mount Kemmel .
In 1924, and again in 1928, Jean Cocteau published unpublished poems by Jean Le Roy under the title Le Cavalier de Frize . Cocteau wrote the preface. After the war, some anthologies mention it. In 2015, the Society of Friends of Louis Le Guennec 3 brought together Jean Le Roy's published and unpublished poems in a book entitled Jean Le Roy, from Quimper to the trenches 4 . The correspondence with the American art critic Walter Pach, integrated into the book, shows how much the poet was perceived as an essential ferment of the new art, of which he was a powerful milestone.
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