The son of Lille merchants, the French poet Albert Samain’s father died in 1872 when Albert was just fourteen years old, and he had to interrupt his studies to earn a living. He worked first as a messenger for a stockbroker, then was employed in a sugar brokerage house. In 1880 he moved to Paris, where became a dispatcher at the Seine Prefecture in 1883.

Long attracted to poetry, he frequented fashionable circles such as the Hirsutes and the Hydropathes, and began reciting his poems at the evenings of the Chat Noir. He participated in a literary circle which brought together a few friends, including Antony Mars, Alfred Vallette and Victor Forbin, in a back room on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. In 1889 he participated in the creation of the Mercure de France with Alfred Vallette, Ernest Raynaud, Jules Renard, Édouard Dubus and Louis Dumur. In the early 1890s, strongly influenced by Baudelaire, he moved towards a more elegiac poetry. In 1893 the publication of the collection Au jardin de l’infante (In the Garden of the Infanta) brought him immediate success when François Coppée devoted a very complimentary article to him in Le Journal. The perfection of form, combined with a melancholic and contemplative vein, characterises an art of extreme sensitivity. He collaborated in particular with the Mercure de France and the Revue des Deux Mondes. The expanded edition of Au jardin de l’infante, which appeared in 1897, was a huge success, and was reprinted in tens of thousands of copies continuously until the 1930s. By then Samain was then one of the most esteemed poets of the time, and formed literary and personal friendships with his peers, including Georges Rodenbach, Charles Guérin, Francis Jammes, Pierre Louÿs and Henri de Régnier.

His mother died in January 1899, and from November that year Samain’s health deteriorated. In the spring the Prefecture granted him leave for what turned out to be consumption. He then went to Lille to stay with his sister, then was taken in by his friend Raymond Bonheur at Magny-les-Hameaux, in the Chevreuse valley. It was there that he died a few months later, at the age of forty-two. But he had time to write Polyphème, a lyrical drama for which Raymond Bonheur composed choruses, often considered his masterpiece, which would not be staged until four years after his death.

Samain’s view on sexuality and sensuality can be described as refined, aestheticised, and idealised, rather than overtly erotic or provocative. He aligns more closely with the romanticised sensuality of poets like Charles Baudelaire (especially the more introspective side of Baudelaire) and Paul Verlaine, but with less transgression and more wistfulness.

Samain often explores physical beauty and romantic longing through soft, musical language and delicate imagery. His poetry tends to elevate sensual experience into a dreamlike, often melancholic realm. This sensuality is filtered through idealised female figures, faded roses, twilight landscapes, and music, invoking feeling rather than flesh. There is often an undertone of unfulfilled desire in his poetry, a yearning for intimacy that remains out of reach. This gives his treatment of sensuality a poignant, almost chaste quality. He seems more interested in the emotional resonance of longing than in the consummation of desire.

There is very little documented evidence about Albert Samain’s intimate or romantic relationships. His life was relatively private, and few biographical details about his personal relationships have survived. Unlike contemporaries such as Paul Verlaine or Arthur Rimbaud, whose lives were as notorious as their works, Samain kept a low profile. Some biographers and scholars have speculated that he may have remained celibate, in part due to his shy, sensitive nature and poor health.

This illustrated three-volume set of Samain’s works is one of the most attractive, including the expanded Au jardin d’infante, Le chariot d’or (The Golden Chariot),Symphonie héroíque, Aux flanc du vase (On the Side of a Vase), Poèmes inachevés (Unfinished Poems), and the play Polyphème. Published by the prestigious Paris publisher H. Piazza, the elegant design and typography is somewhat let down by the poor colour reproduction of the sixty Bécat illustrations accompanying Samain’s text, but it still gives us a clear visual sense of the poet’s artistic sensuality, with every opportunity taken to introduce naked flesh into as many images as possible.

The Bécat-illustrated Samain was published by L’Édition d’Art H. Piazza in a limited, numbered and boxed edition of 4,000 copies.