2

1916–1930:

Dada and the Heroic Period of

Surrealism

Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett,

André Breton, Claude Cahun, Malcolm de Chazal, Robert Desnos,

Paul Éluard, Jean Follain, Greta Knutson, Michel Leiris, Henri

Michaux, Benjamin Péret, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert, Raymond

Queneau, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Philippe Soupault, Jean Tardieu,

Tristan Tzara, Marguerite Yourcenar

D

ada had a striking and lasting impact on American po-
etry, from the Beats through the New York School—
witness John Cage’s mesostics, Frank O’Hara’s ‘‘Second
Avenue,’’ Kenneth Koch’s ‘‘When the Sun Tries to Go On,’’ and much of
John Ashbery’s work. Now the current generation of young American
poets seems to have discovered Dada for itself, finding its ‘‘chatty ab-
stractions’’ as usefully subversive and ironically charming as Dada once
did. The excitement of Dada—its performative violence coincident with
World War I—was born anew after World War II, when the Abstract
Expressionist Robert Motherwell published his celebrated The Dada
Painters and Poets.∞ When the poet Allen Ginsberg first met Motherwell,
as the painter told it, he rushed up, embraced him, and shouted his
delight in Motherwell’s formative anthology. Many other poets and
readers have since echoed Ginsberg’s sentiment. Tristan Tzara (‘‘Papa-
Dada’’), who died in 1963, became something of a cult hero in the 1960s,
when many, both young and not-so-young, wore NADADA buttons.
During the early years of the Vietnam era, Tzara’s early plays began to
enjoy revivals in art galleries. On one such occasion, in the former
Cordier-Ekstrom Gallery, Andy Warhol played the role of Nose in La