Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and the drunken kisses of cyclones. Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of Mad Love to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of the natural and unnatural world, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor. Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems--many of them translated into English for the first time--by Surrealists who charged their work through with all forms of eroticism. Within these pages you will read the magnificent love poems of Desnos, which rank among the greatest in twentieth-century poetry, and hear the voices of lesser known poets such as Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Poems by familiar Surrealists such as Breton, the movement's leader, and Paul Eluard join work by Octavio Paz and Philippe Soupault. Interspersed with the poetry are photographs by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. Expertly and energetically translated by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that the embrace of poetry like that of bodies/As long as it lasts/Shuts out all the woes of the world.

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.

Thirty years of poems chronicle the sometimes turbulent marriage of two famed writers

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.

Published to accompany Tate Modern's exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound, this is a collection of love poems by Surrealists of the 20th century. The poems are organized thematically and are interspersed with Surrealist photographs, including Man Ray, Lee Miller and Claude Cahun.