He spent his early years at his family's ancestral manor (which his mother had purchased) in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault (now Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier), Quebec, where his cousin Anne Hébert was born in 1916.

[3] In 1925, Garneau studied painting at Montreal's Collège des beaux-arts with Paul-Emile Borduas, Jean Palardy, Marjorie Smith and Jean-Paul Lemieux.

[5] Regards et Jeux dans l'espace was published in March 1937 and received a rather cold reception from critics, which (we like to believe,) would have deeply shaken the author.

On the original form of this poetry, François Hébert writes: "In a very stripped-down speech, the simplest on the surface, but with extremely varied registers, as long as you listen to it, Garneau inlaid a thousand and one surprises [...]: rhymes or assonances and unexpected references ('chaise', double phonetic and semantic contraction of a 'malaise' and a 'chose'), jarring syntax ('living and art'), phonetic gambols (of 'je' to 'jeu', from 'moi' to 'joie' via 'pas'), semantic breaks and leaps (from 'body' to 'soul', from 'self' to 'world').

[...] Bizarrely laid out on the page (as a staircase, irregularly spaced), the verses abound in unforeseen rhymes, in clever alliterations, placed as if by chance [...]"[13]Alain Grandbois sums it up: “Garneau's poetry [...] seems to me to provide the most perfect expression of the most astonishing freedom.

[14] Even if de Saint-Denys Garneau himself would have been disappointed with its reception, Regards et Jeux dans l'espace is today considered one of the most important books of Quebec poetry.

[15] The recent declassification of many unpublished letters by Garneau calls for a rereading of all of his correspondence, which can no longer simply be considered as a sideline to the work, as it links all the pieces of it.

Moment often “described with a strong, mocking sensuality,” as if the poet took, it is clear, great pleasure in feeling what, ordinarily, “arouses only repulsion [...].

In the private space of the letter, without the restraint imposed by publication, De Saint-Denys Garneau addresses in a very free and down-to-earth way the central question of all his writings: how to be?.

Reading his Letters in the form of a continuous text, one manages to grasp the coherence of this character, for whom “being is a fictional activity”, and writing, an absolute.

Also, "his work cannot be "understood" or [worse] "explained" without giving a large part to the ontological adventure, which is, at least as far as de Saint-Denys Garneau is concerned, the alpha and the omega.".

Biron remarks: "Almost all of Garneau's writings, this is an exceptional fact in the history of modern literature, escapes the public sphere.".

[20] For François Hébert, de Saint-Denys Garneau “was able to say the essential in a few words, with a terrifying and admirable authenticity” then, “shut it up, to let us find it again. ».

Since his death, he has known a long purgatory from which he has been slowly emerging for several years [...] Most writers Québécois preferred to De Saint-Denys Garneau's 'bad poor' (cf.

In attempting to characterize the forms that de Saint-Denys Garneau experimented with in the notebooks that have come down to us—from self-examination, fiction and the letter, to meditations on art, and poetry: "It emerges from this examination that Garneau progressively linked reflective discourse with the openings offered by poetry and fiction: a dynamic develops between the life summary and the sketch, leading to a form of writing that incorporates various aspects of his Diary”.

But I hope you would not be wrong in believing that you can still address the center at some point, a small flame perhaps which persists, a remnant of what was ravaged [...], where perhaps persists the place of a possible hope of not being rejected from the Be-ing itself.” — Journal 1929–1939, January 21, 1939One notices a unity in the diversity of the forms borrowed by de Saint-Denys Garneau: “At the end of his journey, de Saint-Denys Garneau manages to free himself from literary conventions to find a totalizing form (but always fragmentary) by which poetry and fiction are linked to existence”.

[26] Garneau's 1935–39 diary was published in Montréal in 1954 under the title Journal, edited by Élie and Le Moyne and with a preface by Gilles Marcotte.

[28] Garneau's poetry has also been translated into Spanish by Luis Vicente de Aguinaga, and was published in 2007 as Todos y cada uno.

[29] Some of Garneau's poems have been set to music by the Canadian contemporary classical composer Bruce Mather,[30] and by the Quebec folk group Villeray.