Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and particularly favored Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire (see the letter of 23 October 1869 cited extensively below).

He lived in the "Intellectual Quarter", in a hotel in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where he worked intensely on the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror.

The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious", and reported that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds".

His chosen name may have been based on[citation needed] the title character of Eugène Sue's popular 1837 gothic novel Latréaumont [fr], a haughty and blasphemous antihero similar in some ways to Isidore's Maldoror.

Ducasse urgently asked Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had published Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, to send copies of his book to the critics.

He tried to explain his position, and even offered to change some "too strong" points for future editions: I have written of evil as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done.

He differentiated the two parts of his work with the terms philosophy and poetry, announcing that the beginning of a struggle against evil was the reversal of his other work: I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, malice with good, complaints with duty, scepticism with faith, sophisms with cool equanimity and pride with modesty.At the same time Ducasse took texts by famous authors and cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized for Poésies: Plagiarism is necessary.

On 19 July 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, and after his capture, Paris was besieged on 17 September, a situation with which Ducasse was already familiar from his early childhood in Montevideo.

Since many were afraid of epidemics while Paris was besieged, Ducasse was buried the next day after a service in Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in a provisional grave at the Cimetière du Nord.

In his Poésies Lautréamont announced: "I will leave no memoirs", and as such, the life of the creator of Les Chants de Maldoror remains for the most part unknown.

Ignore the following baneful pen-pushers: Sand, Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Musset, Du Terrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte and the Grève des Forgerons!Despite this, there are commonalities with Maldoror.

"[10] In 1917, French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted.

As one of the poètes maudits (accursed poets), he was elevated to the Surrealist pantheon beside Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and acknowledged as a direct precursor to Surrealism.

[11] André Gide regarded him — even more than Rimbaud — as the most significant figure, as the "gate-master of tomorrow's literature", meriting Breton and Soupault "to have recognized and announced the literary and ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont".

Louis Aragon and Breton discovered the only copies of the Poésies in the National Library of France, and published the text in April and May 1919 in two sequential editions of their magazine Literature.

It was the 1927 publication by Soupault and Breton that assured him a permanent place in French literature and the status of patron saint in the Surrealist movement.

Referencing this line, the debut record by the experimental/industrial music group Nurse with Wound is titled Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.

Individual works have been produced by Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez, André Masson, Joan Miró, Aimé Césaire, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy.

Situationist founder, filmmaker and author Guy Debord developed a section from Poésies II as thesis 207 in The Society of the Spectacle.

[citation needed] Kenneth Anger claimed to have tried to make a film based on Maldoror, under the same title, but could not raise enough money to complete it.

[15] In recent years, invoking an obscure clause in the French civil code, Article 171, modern performance artist Shishaldin petitioned the government for permission to marry the author posthumously.

Brazilian author Joca Reiners Terron depicts the character of Isidoro Ducasse as one of the seven angels of the Apocalypse in his first novel, Não Há Nada Lá.

Lautréamont, as an unnamed "South American", appears as a character in Julio Cortázar's short story "The Other Heaven", which also uses quotations from Maldoror as epigraphs.

[17] French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist Félix Guattari cited Lautréamont twice over the course of their joint two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, once in each volume.