This study proposes that there has been a revival of surrealist poetry, and traces an uninterrupted thread of development in surrealism throughout 20th-century English poetry.

Surrealist Poetry presents new English translations of nearly 150 poems alongside their original French and Spanish versions. Founded by André Breton in 1924, Surrealism sought to examine the unconscious realm by means of the written or spoken word. Seeking to expand the ability of language to evoke irrational states and improbable events, it consistently strove to transcend the linguistic status quo. By stretching language to its limits and beyond, the Surrealists transformed it into an instrument for exploring the human psyche. The twenty-three poets in this collection come not only from France, where Surrealism was invented, but also from Spain, Belgium, Martinique, Mauritius, Catalonia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Three of them were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Equipped with a critical introduction and a brief bibliography, this anthology will appeal to anyone interested in modern literature.

Surrealist Poets is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth Edition. The essays in Surrealist Poets discuss such influential poets as Louis Aragon, Robert Bly, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Neruda, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.

An exciting new collection of the essential writings of surrealism, the European avant-garde movement of the mind’s deepest powers Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon created a movement that spread wildly to all corners of the globe, inspiring not only poetry but also artists like Joan Miro and René Magritte and cinematic works by Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí. As the editor, Mary Ann Caws, says, “Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.” Here are the gems of this major, mind-bending aesthetic, political, and humane movement: writers as diverse as Aragon, Breton, Dalí, René Char, Robert Desnos, Mina Loy, Paul Magritte, Alice Paalen, Gisèle Prassinos, Man Ray, Kay Sage, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are included here, providing a grand picture of this revolutionary movement that shocked the world.