Writing Poetry can Endanger Your Health - Part Fifteen: The Poet As Surrealist by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet as Surrealist by Dave Jaffe Section One
   

    `   "I believe in the future resolution of the two states, dream and reality," wrote the poet and co-founder of the Surrealist movement Andre Breton. "They are seemingly so contradictory. (Yet they merge) into a kind of reality, a surreality."
     Breton was born in France in 1896. He started out his career as a medical student. Yet along came the First World War in 1914 and Breton ended up working in psychiatric wards of medical hospitals. He helped treat people who had what to-day we would call 'post-traumatic stress disorders.' They were recovering from the things they endured in battles. 14 million people died in World War One. In the war France lost one million of its citizens.
    The war that ended in 1918 turned things in Europe upside down. At war's end Breton went back to Paris. At first he joined the Dada movement that tried to destroy the old visual arts world's practices and beliefs. Yet Breton didn't stay with the Dadaists. By now, Breton had read modern French poetry by Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. He also had read works by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, the by now well known psychiatrist.
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    At war's end Breton and some other intellectuals started a new art movement. They called their movement, 'Surrealism'. In 1924 Breton published a work called 'The Manifesto of Surrealism' . Breton had now helped create one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century. Surrealists stressed the fine line that hung between reason and unreason. They were interested, some would say, "obsessed" with dreams, erotica, and mental neuroses and psychoses.
      But how could you get into these states of mind? Here surrealists drew on the works of Sigmund Freud. All artists had to use free association and streams of consciousness. This was somewhat similar to Freud's work with his psychiatric patients, who were advised by Freud to  say whatever came up in their minds. The surrealists called what they were doing 'Automatism'.
    Poets and writers, said Breton, should write down whatever they were thinking. They should censor nothing. Soon works of art should emerge from this process. "It was pure psychic automatism," Breton said of surrealism.
    Many talented writers like Antonin Artaud, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Michel Leiris and Rene Crevel joined the surrealists.  Later on, talented visual artists, like Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Paul Eluard, Roberto Matta and Meret Oppenheim joined the movement or were influenced by it. Even Pablo Picasso  felt the influence of surrealism. The surrealists wanted him to join their movement. But he never did
    Still ,by about 1930, surrealism's influence was being felt in many artistic circles. More triumphs and challenges lay ahead for Breton and his disciples..
           (To be continued).