The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

introduction

xxxvii

One of the main sources of poetic excitement in the early part of the
century was the cult of the primitive. After the carnage of the First World
War, the perceived primitivism of blacks and African art was seen as a
challenge to Western ‘‘progress’’ and culture and a repudiation of the
colonial enterprise. Before and during the 1920s a wave of negrophilia
swept Paris—the influence of black culture abundantly evident in the
paintings of Picasso and André Derain, in the poetry of Guillaume Apol-
linaire, and, slightly later, in the Dada works of the Romanian Tristan
Tzara (first performed in 1916 in Zurich in the Cabaret Voltaire). Tzara’s
magnificent Vingt-cinq poèmes are full of sounds imitating ‘‘primitive’’
languages. For example, the poem ‘‘Pélamide’’ begins

a e ou o youyouyou I e ou o

youyouyou

drrrrdrrrrdrrrrgrrrrgrrrr≤≠

And the delightful poem ‘‘Moi touche-moi touche-moi seulement’’ (Me
touch me just touch me) takes up the same sound:

mécanisme drrrr rrrrr barres écartées

(mechanism drrrr rrrrr bars spread apart)≤∞

This explosion of sound is motivated, if not explained, by the narrator’s
picturing himself as the kind of engine that goes anywhere when it is
enamored of something or someone:

je suis tramway quelque-part va-et-vient dans l’amour

(I am a tram somewhere going and coming in love).≤≤

Tzara’s hatred of the ordinary in language and vision unleashes, in the
Dada poems, a frenetic excitement verging on hysteria. If the typographi-
cal and sound poetry of this period borrowed from what were giddily
considered primitive cultures, the fascination with ‘‘the other’’ continued
throughout the early part of the century. Anthropological investigations,
such as those in the Swiss journal Anthropos gave credibility and backing
to poetic experimentation. The distinction drawn by Senghor—‘‘Emo-
tion is black; reason is Hellenic’’—was not considered wildly untrue.≤≥
The excitement over Dada, mixed with despair over World War I, led
in its own noisy way to the more organized collective and manifesto-
writing Surrealist movement of the early 1920s. In the early days of Sur-
realism, André Breton was acknowledged as its Pope, and indeed he
comported himself as such. Church doctrine, as decreed by Breton, was
heavily based on the belief in ‘‘psychic automatism’’—freeing the uncon-
scious for verbal and visual experimentation—which included dreams,