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.

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 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.

This extensive and wide-ranging selection comprises the poetry of one of France's most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos. Hailed as the 'prophet' of the Surrealist movement by AndrE Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work completely underrepresented in the English language, with only his children's poems currently available in English translation. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.

Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and the drunken kisses of cyclones. Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of Mad Love to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of the natural and unnatural world, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor. Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems--many of them translated into English for the first time--by Surrealists who charged their work through with all forms of eroticism. Within these pages you will read the magnificent love poems of Desnos, which rank among the greatest in twentieth-century poetry, and hear the voices of lesser known poets such as Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Poems by familiar Surrealists such as Breton, the movement's leader, and Paul Eluard join work by Octavio Paz and Philippe Soupault. Interspersed with the poetry are photographs by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. Expertly and energetically translated by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that the embrace of poetry like that of bodies/As long as it lasts/Shuts out all the woes of the world.

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

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time. Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.