CREMAZIE, OCTAVE

born April 16, 1827, Quebec died Jan. 16, 1879, Le Havre, Fr. byname of Claude-joseph-olivier Crmazie poet considered the father of French-Canadian poetry. An extraordinarily learned man, educated at the Seminary of Quebec, Crmazie started a bookshop in 1848 that became the centre of an influential literary circle. In 1860 Crmazie and his friends founded the first literary school of Quebec and in 1861 began issuing a monthly magazine of literature and history, Les Soires Canadiennes, to preserve the folklore of French Canada. Crmazie also published poems in the Journal de Qubec from about 1854. He left Canada in 1862 for France, where he hoped he would become economically more secure, but he spent the rest of his life there in great poverty, under the assumed name of Jules Fontaine. In this period he wrote the pessimistic poem Promenade des trois morts, which remained unfinished, and a journal, Sige de Paris, that gave an eyewitness account of the siege of 1870. His poems are characterized by a patriotic love of Canada and the Canadian landscape. His most famous patriotic poems are Le vieux soldat canadien (1855; The Old Canadian Soldier), celebrating the first French naval ship to visit Quebec in almost a century, and Le Drapeau de Carillon (1858; The Flag of Carillon), which almost became a national song of Canada. Crmazie's Oeuvres compltes (Complete Works) were collected and published by his friends in 1882.