Background
Eugène Seers was born on November 28, 1865 in Beauharnois, Canada.
Louis studied at the Collège de Montréal.
Eugène Seers was born on November 28, 1865 in Beauharnois, Canada.
Seers studied at the Collège de Montréal and later attended seminary to become a Roman Catholic priest. He was later associated with the École littéraire de Montréal.
While a member of the religious order Congrégation de Très Saint-Sacrement, Seers wrote religious poetry, short stories, and critical articles, especially on the poetry of Émile Nelligan. Seers knew and admired Nelligan and was largely responsible for editing Émile Nelligan et son oeuvre, to which Seers also contributed an influential preface.
He left the order in 1903 and became a typographer in Boston and later worked for the Harvard University Press. His criticism, at first in the form of correspondence with French Canadian authors, achieved recognition in Montreal in the 1920s. In his Poètes de l’Amérique française and Gloses critiques, Seers insisted on judging a work solely on artistic merit. He was also the author of Le Coffret de Crusoé, a volume of poems dealing with his loss of faith, and Les Enfances de Fanny, a semiautobiographical novel.
Two writers, Claude-Henri Grignon in his 1936 Les Pamphlets de Valdombre and Yvette Francoli in her 2013 Le Naufragé du Vaisseau d'or, have alleged that Dantin was the actual author of most of the poetry credited to Nelligan. Dantin denied Grignon's claims in several of his letters to other writers.
He died on January 17, 1945 aged 79 in Boston.
In 1903 Louis married Clotilde Lacroix.