Surrealist Painters And Poets

Art and writings by Surrealist painters and poets from a wide range of countries.

"In this groundbreaking, original study, J. H. Matthews, "clearly the chief scholarly explicator of surrealism today," according to Contemporary Literature, shows the surrealists' goals and the imaginative freedom of mind are fused and diffused in the poet's creative world. Hallucination, game-playing, experimental research, and the irrational which nurtures new ways of poetical expression are all interwoven. Out of their eagerness to share benefits they ascribed to mental disturbance surrealists developed an approach to poetic technique which capitalized on teh free association of the unconscious mind without undermining the sanity of the poets themselves. Matthews discusses early surrealist interest in psychosis, hysteria, and insanity. This interest underlies such major works as Andre Breton's Nadja and breton's and Paul Eluard's The Immaculate Conception. It is in the latter text that the issue of insanity and its relationship to poetic activity is most clearly revealed as essential to the surrealist enterprise. Also included here are chapters on insanity's poetic simulation and possession. Matthews' work is important to anyone interested in poetry, the unconscious, and the history of twentieth-century ideas, as well as to scholars of surrealism. Karol baron, a Czech surrealist artists, has provided six original drawings especially for this book" -- Dust jacket.

It seems astonishing that some fifty years following the founding and first flourishings of the Surrealist movement, and despite the publication of anthologies such as this in many countries, throughout the world, there should not until now have been a single anthology in English of its poets. For the most part, readers here have had to find the major Surrealist poets embedded in the few existing anthologies of miscellaneous twentieth-century French poetry. Often, they have been accompanied by strange bedfellows i0ndeed, and usually represented by such abbreviated quantities of works as to blur both the overall quality of poets involved and the uniqueness of the movement from which they derive strength. In this more concentrated selection, focusing in most cases on major figures, we hope to represent something more of the extent of both this uniqueness and this excellence. -- Introduction.

Surrealist Poets is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth Edition. The essays in Surrealist Poets discuss such influential poets as Louis Aragon, Robert Bly, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Neruda, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Presents a collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations that provide an overview of the Dada movement in art, describing its convictions, antics, and spirit, through the words and art of its principal practitioners.

The concept of poesie critique - poetry that possesses both a poetic and a critical function - has an extensive history in modern literature. Written in response to another work of art, be it a painting, a film, a poem, or a piece of music, the critical poem comments on the latter in various ways but refuses to abandon its poetic mission. Marvelous Encounters examines surrealist poets writing in French, Spanish, and Catalan who experimented with this intriguing genre. The first three chapters are concerned with the French surrealists, who began to cultivate critical poetry toward the end of World War I. Chapter 2 considers how Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault appropriated the critical poem, as they reviewed books of poetry and films starring Charlie Chaplin. Chapter 3, which examines how Benjamin Peret and Paul Eluard conceived of critical poetry, analyzes their response to poems by Tristan Tzara and paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Joan Miro. Chapter 4 is devoted entirely to Andre Breton.

Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts poems, journals, essays, and letters as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades. "A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse" David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education "Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems" Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review.

Surrealist Poetry presents new English translations of nearly 150 poems alongside their original French and Spanish versions. Founded by André Breton in 1924, Surrealism sought to examine the unconscious realm by means of the written or spoken word. Seeking to expand the ability of language to evoke irrational states and improbable events, it consistently strove to transcend the linguistic status quo. By stretching language to its limits and beyond, the Surrealists transformed it into an instrument for exploring the human psyche. The twenty-three poets in this collection come not only from France, where Surrealism was invented, but also from Spain, Belgium, Martinique, Mauritius, Catalonia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Three of them were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Equipped with a critical introduction and a brief bibliography, this anthology will appeal to anyone interested in modern literature.