Surrealist Poetry

This study proposes that there has been a revival of surrealist poetry, and traces an uninterrupted thread of development in surrealism throughout 20th-century English poetry.

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.

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.

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

Given that the Surrealists were initially met with widespread incomprehension, mercilessly ridiculed, and treated as madmen, it is remarkable that more than one hundred years on we still feel the vitality and continued popularity of the movement today. As Willard Bohn demonstrates, Surrealism was not just a French phenomenon but one that eventually encompassed much of the world. Concentrating on the movement's theory and practice, this extraordinarily broad-ranging book documents the spread of Surrealism throughout the western hemisphere and examines keys texts, critical responses, and significant writers. The latter include three extraordinarily talented individuals who were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Andre Breton, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Like their Surrealist colleagues, they strove to free human beings from their unconscious chains so that they could realize their true potential. One Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry explores not only the birth but also the ongoing life of a major literary movement.

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.