Overview

First published in 1959, Surrealism remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction, Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary poetry. This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.

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9780226035604

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Reviews

The spirit of contradiction has always been a part of surrealism, both as a precept in its own right and as an instance of the contradictions within the theories of the surrealists themselves. So it is good to have a new and updated edition of Anna Balakian's standard work which presents as cogent and persuasive an account of this troublesome subject as we are likely to get. Most commentators think of surrealism as the revelation of le merveilleux, the autonomous appropriation of the imagination where lucidity is the great enemy, but Miss Balakian is surely closer to the matter when she insists that the surrealists on their road to the absolute were in search of new myths to symbolize the new visions. They were, in effect, above and beyond their quarrel with traditional culture, specifically Western rationalism, attempting to change man's apprehension of himself and his world, creating a revolution in consciousness, integrating art and philosophy, art and science, which would occur within society and history, not in a vacuum of mere subjectivity. Miss Balakian is concerned primarily with the achievement of poets such as Apollinaire, Crevel, Desnos, Reverdy, and Breton, and her chapters on linguistic experimentation or personal psychology are beautifully rendered. She is less fortunate, however, when dealing with the movement's tricky intellectual underpinnings, the whole series of cloudy doctrines, spearheaded by Breton, which still, because of their inherent ambiguity, give surrealism a bad name in Anglo-Saxon circles. Her survey, nevertheless, is in every other way admirable and quite to the point. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of five books of poems and three prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, a New York Times best seller; and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir.

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