He surrealism Was the most influential aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. Although it began in Paris in the 1920s, its legacy will extend over much of the planet and well into the century.
The term refers to a state superior to realism. It seeks the liberation of art, expressed without the intervention of reason or consciousness.
This approach proposes the construction of a new scale of values and the abolition of the canons established until then.
Surrealistic ideas derive from the concept of the subconscious of Sigmund Freud And the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry. In addition, it is given to the task of rescuing some French poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire (from which they take the name) and Lautreamont.
From the latter, they extract the maxim of Poetry must be made by all And his particular concept of the aesthetic fact: Almost as beautiful as The fortuitous union of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.
To achieve their objectives they developed a series of techniques that inherited the history of art and literature. The fundamental method was automatic writing that sought to portray the subconscious itself by not mediate with any kind of thinking.
Another very popular procedure was the exquisite corpse, which consisted of a group composition where each member placed a phrase or drawing and the next participant completed it without knowing the above and finally finding what they called objective chance.
At first, they were related and were indebted to Dada. But with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto In 1924 the definitive rupture occurs. Then, to transcend their revolutionary spirit, ironically, they approach communism and anarchism.
Surrealism achieved rapid recognition and served as inspiration for poems, novels, paintings, sculptures and cinematographic works. He then gathers a small sample of his legacy.
You may also like These poems of Dada .
10 Poems of surrealism and their authors
There will be André Breton
The main promoter and the visible face of surrealism was André Breton. A medical student and interested in mental illness, he worked in psychiatric hospitals.
After being interested in the Dadaism Begins to experiment with automatic writing. Using this procedure he writes four hands with Philippe Soupault The magnetic fields .
Then Louis Aragon will join and found the magazine Littérature . Breton writes the Surrealist Manifesto And make your project clear: Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until the appearance of it, and on the free exercise of thought. It tends to destroy definitively all the remaining psychic mechanisms, and to substitute them in the resolution of the main problems of the life .
In 1927, he joined the French Communist Party and urged his comrades to do the same. Then began a series of claims and expulsions of the movement that earned him the nickname"pope of surrealism." His defense of the movement took him for countless trips and won many friends and enemies.
There will be
Where does that source noise come from?
However the key did not stay in the door
What to do to move these huge stones
That day I will tremble to lose a trace
In one of the tangled districts of Lyon
It was a mouthful of mint when he was turning twenty
Before me the hypnotic path with a darkly happy woman
On the other hand habits will change a lot
The great prohibition will be lifted
A dragonfly will run to hear me in 1950
At this crossroads
Vertigo is the most beautiful thing I've ever known
And every May 25 at the end of the afternoon the old Delescluze
With august mask descends towards the Château-d'Eau
It would seem that shuffled letters of mirrors in the shade.
Towards the evening-Philippe Soupault
One of the figures who accompanied Breton from the beginning of the movement and the passage through Dadaism was Philippe Soupault. However, he was also one of the first victims of the pope's excommunications.
Soupault's great contribution to the historical avant-gardes, more than his poetry, was his work as a critic and chronicler of those tumultuous years during which he was one of the protagonists.
Towards the night
It's late
In the shade and in the wind
A scream rises with the night
I do not wait for anyone
to nobody
Not even a memory
The time has passed long ago
But that shout that carries the wind
And push forward
Comes from a place that is beyond
Above sleep
I do not wait for anyone
But here is the night
Crowned by fire
Of the eyes of all the dead
Silent
And everything that had to disappear
Everything lost
We have to find it again
Above sleep
Towards the night.
The One-Paul Eluard
Another character that came from Dadaist influence was Paul Eluard. Akin to Breton's political ideas, he develops a similar work with the ideas of the Communist Party and writes together Immaculate Conception.
Unfortunately, however, Eluard's celebrity lies more in gossip than in his contribution to surrealism: his first wife, Gala, is seduced by Salvador Dalí, who decides to leave the poet and plunge him into a deep depression.
The only one
She had in the tranquility of her body
A small red snowball
Had on the shoulders
A shadow of silence a shadow of rose
Cover by its halo
His hands and docile bows and singers
They broke the light.
She counted the minutes without falling asleep.
To the mysterious-Robert Desnos
The surrealists denounced traditional versification and the classical form of poetry. And this is what Robert Desnos was worth to Breton's animosity after some first flattery.
Desnos wrote along with the same Breton, Eluard and Tristan Tzara, that first experiment that would end up being the exquisite corpse: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine .
Nevertheless, in spite of being expelled from the movement like so many others, the revolutionary will of this poet transcends any work: during the Second World War militates in the French resistance and is captured by the Nazis until dies in a concentration camp.
To the mysterious
I have dreamed so much of you that you lose your reality.
Will there be time to reach that living body
And kiss on that mouth
The birth of the voice I want?
I've dreamed of you so much,
That my arms used to cross
On my chest, embrace your shadow,
And maybe they no longer know how to adapt
To the outline of your body.
I've dreamed of you so much,
That surely I will not be able to wake up.
I sleep standing up,
With my poor body offered
To all appearances
Of life and love, and you are the only one
Which counts now for me.
It will be harder for me to touch your forehead.
And your lips, that the first lips
And the first front you find.
And against real existence
Of that which obsesses me
For days and years
I will surely become a shadow.
I've dreamed of you so much,
Both I talked and walked, I lay next to
Of your shadow and of your ghost,
and therefore,
I have only to be a ghost
Between the ghosts and a hundred times more shade
That the shadow that always walks happily
By the solar quadrant of your life.
The soles canoros-René Char
The contempt for the classic forms of versification, generated that the surrealists used the free verse for their texts. The verse, which has no fixed extension nor rhyme served for these purposes.
Much younger than the founders, René Char begins his poetic work under the shadow of surrealism. In the following example, the use of this composition manner can be observed.
The soles canoros
The unexplained disappearances
Unpredictable accidents
Misfortunes perhaps excessive
Catastrophes of all kinds
The cataclysms that drown and carbonize the
Suicide considered crime
The intractable degenerates
The ones that roll in the head a blacksmith's apron
The naive of the first magnitude
Those who put their mother's coffin on the bottom of a well
Unlearned brains
The brains of leather
Those who winter in the hospital and conserve the drunkenness of
Torn clothes
The mallow of the prisons
Nettle of prisons
The wet nurse fig tree
The incurable silencers
Those who channel the foam of the underworld
The poets excavators
Those who kill the orphans by playing the bugle
The magicians of the ear
There is a benign temperature around the sweaty embalmers of work.
Black poet-Antonin Artaud
Another of the young people whose talent blossoms thanks to surrealism is Antonin Artaud. Tireless searcher for a genuine form of expression that made him explore literary genres and travel the world.
His work shares the explosive language of the surrealists and also announces the theater of the absurd that will be precursor.
Black poet
Black poet, a maiden's breast
You obsess
Bitter poet, bulla life
And the city burns,
And the sky is solved in rain,
And your pen spreads the heart of life.
Jungle, jungle, tingling eyes
In multiplied pinnacles;
Storm hair, the poets
Ride on horses, dogs.
The eyes are enraged, the languages revolve
The sky flows in the face
Like blue milk nourishment;
I am aware of your mouths
Women, hard hearts of vinegar.
Current-Vicente Huidobro
Although Vicente Huidobro advocated an independent movement, creationism, the imprint of the surrealists in it is unquestionable.
Thanks to the Chilean poet, surrealism reached American coasts and in his native country will exercise great influence in Pablo Neruda and in the group that formed around the magazine The mandrake .
Current
The sky shakes his shirts and counts the years in his voice
Count the stones thrown to your chest
And the trees in their sarcophagi twisting the roads
Think of his trembling flesh
Hearing that duo of nights so diametrically opposed
When you hear the ages that are your age
Like the round-trip flowers
The night feels to hear its sky
Under the water that increases by the cries of the fish
And we are all waiting with open pores
The appearance of beauty on her feet foam
Between two lightnings upside down.
Sun Serpent-Aimé Césaire
Surrealism also came to the French colonies in the pen of Aime Cesaire. Poet and politician of Martinique, is one of the ideologues of the concept of blackness.
Breton, after meeting him on a trip to the Antilles, writes the prologue to the French editions of his poems.
Serpent Sun
Sun Snake eye fascinator eye of mine
The sea lice of islands crunching on the fingers of roses
Flaming spear and my intact body fulminated
The water raises the bones of light lost in the corridor without
pomp
Ice whirls aureolan the smoking heart of crows
our hearts
Is the voice of the domesticated rays that turn on their hinges
Of lizard
Transfer of anolis to the landscape of broken glass
Are the vampire flowers that come up to relieve the orchids
Elixir of the central fire
Fire fair fire mango night covered with bees
My wish a chance of tigers surprised in the sulfur
But the staggering awakening dora with the infantile deposits
And my pebble body eating fish that eats
Pigeons and dreams
The sugar of the word Brazil in the bottom of the swamp.
Childhood and death-Federico García Lorca
García Lorca is the most popular Spanish poet of the 20th century. His posthumous book, Poet in New York Is written under the influence of surrealism.
The visionary images and the free verse, give him the expressive freedom necessary to express the anguish that generated the visit to that city.
Childhood and death
To seek my childhood, my God!
I ate rotten oranges, old papers, empty dovecotes
And found my little body eaten by rats
In the bottom of the cistern with the hair of the madmen.
My sailor suit
Was not soaked with the oil of the whales
But I had the vulnerable eternity of the photographs.
Drowned, yes, well drowned, sleep, my son, sleep.
Child defeated at school and in the waltz of the wounded rose,
Astonished with the dark dawn of hair on his thighs,
Amazed at his own man who chewed tobacco in his
Sinister side
I hear a dry river full of canned
Where they sing the sewers and throw the shirts full of blood.
A river of rotten cats that pretend corollas and anemones
To deceive the moon and to lean sweetly on them.
Here alone with my drowned.
Here alone with the breeze of cold mosses and tin covers.
Here, alone, I see that the door has been closed.
I have closed the door and there is a group of dead
That plays to the target and another group of dead
Looking for the kitchen melon shells,
And a solitary, blue, unexplained dead
Who is looking for me on the stairs, who puts his hands in the cistern
While the astros fill the locks of the cathedrals with ash
And the people suddenly stay with all the small costumes.
To seek my childhood, my God!
I ate squeezed lemons, stables, withered newspapers
But my childhood was a rat that fled through a dark garden
And that he wore a golden gait between his tiny teeth.
Ash-Alejandra Pizarnik
The proposal of surrealism was fertile ground for a great number of new poets to begin to explore its qualities.
Exceeded in time and space to any aesthetic avant-garde. The case of Alejandra Pizarnik is private. He writes a concentrated work where one can appreciate the surrealistic imprint in the dream images and the disenchantment towards a reality that is insufficient.
Ashes
The night was splintered with stars
Looking at me in amazement
The air throws hate
Embellished his face
with music.
Soon we will go
Arcane dream
Ancestor of my smile
The world is emaciated
And there is a lock but no keys
And there is dread but no tears.
What will I do with myself?
Because I owe you what I am
But I do not have tomorrow
Because I love you...
The night suffers.
References
- Gullette, Alan (1979). "The Theory and Techniques of Surrealist Poetry". Retrieved on June 1, 2017 from alangullette.com.
- Heath, Nick (2006). "1919-1950: The Politics of Surrealism". Retrieved on June 1, 2017 from libcom.org.
- Holcombe, C. John (2007). "Surrealism in poetry". Retrieved on June 1, 2017 from textetc.com.
- Pariente, Ángel (2002). Comp. Surreal poetry in Spanish. Anthology. Paris: Éditions de la sirène.
- Reyes, Arturo. "Surrealist influence in Latin-American poetry". Retrieved on June 1, 2017 dearturoreyes.com.seanic.net.
- Ulloa Sánchez, Osvaldo. "Surrealism: Only the wonderful is beautiful." Retrieved on June 1, 2017 from poesias.cl/reportaje_surrealismo.htm.