The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

part 2. 1916–1930: dada and the heroic period of surrealism

exile of many Surrealist painters and poets, including Breton, André Mas-
son, Matta, and Kurt Seligmann, to New York during World War I.
In New York, the Abstract Expressionist painters, through the Chilean
Surrealist painter Matta and his American friend Robert Motherwell,
adopted what was best about the spontaneous inspiration or the ‘‘psychic
automatism’’ of Surrealism. In drawing or painting, the initial subliminal
line that Motherwell termed the doodle—which the poet Robert Desnos
had used in his early Surrealist drawings—was the visual equivalent of the
unthinking and uncensored speech that was thought to unleash the
powers of the subconscious. American painters, and then poets, tapped
into this spontaneity and energy, but in the reverse order of the move-
ment in France, where the poets had led the way.
Nor had places like Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Senegal re-
mained untouched by Surrealism, for Breton had multiple contacts with
poets beyond the six sides of the Hexagon that is France. Stopping in
Martinique on his way to New York, Breton was moved to write the
eulogistic tract Martinique charmeuse de serpents (Martinique Charmer of
Snakes). Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas,
and other poets reveled in the new possibilities of experimental tech-
niques and the revitalization of language, vision, and optimism.
Francis Ponge’s experimental work investigates not only the world of
things but the language used to describe them. In his Le Parti pris des
choses (Taking the Side of Things) he celebrates the dailiness of objects
and their mundane but important presence. As Michel Deguy put it,
‘‘Homo faber has never done anything that can equal what he receives, be
it cauliflower or sun—that’s what Ponge did.’’∂
The mystical side of poetry came to the fore with René Daumal’s Le
Grand Jeu (The Great Game), Breton’s notion of le point sublime (in
which all contraries meet), and some American experimental poetics.
Even Breton, after his exile in New York and his encounter with the Native
Americans of the Southwest (particularly the Hopis in Arizona), devel-
oped a strongly mystical streak. By the time he returned to France, Sur-
realism—and the epoch that had nourished it—had changed, but its
legacies remain undeniable. In Canada, Surrealist painters and poets
flourish; in South America, Magical Realism, a cousin to Surrealism, has
taken on the brightest of colors; and in the United States, its influence is
ubiquitous.

Notes

1. Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Witten-
   born, 1951).