The French writer André Breton (1896-1966) was the leader of the surrealist movement, which was the most important force in French poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.André Breton was born in ...
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André Breton, a twentieth-century French poet and essayist, also a novelist and founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, was born in Tinchebray, Normandy, on 19 February 1896, died ...
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André Breton is widely known as the founder and prominent figure of the Surrealist movement in France. His manifestos and essays, including the extended novelistic essay Nadja (1928; translated...
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Bogan was an American lyric poet whose darkly romantic verse is characterized by her use of traditional structures, concise language, and vivid description. Bogan was also a distinguished critic known...
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Merrill is an American poet and critic. In the following review, Merrill presents an overview of Breton's poetic achievement.
How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? The ans...
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Hubert is a poet and scholar. In the following excerpt, she analyzes Breton's surrealist technique in Constellations, a volume consisting of twenty-two prose poems that parallel paintings by th...
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Balakian is an author and educator who has contributed many articles and reviews to language and literature journals. She has also published several book-length studies on Surrealism and Breton, inclu...
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Knowlton is an American critic, translator, and educator. In this essay he stresses the importance of reading the poems in Xénophiles within their original context—as part of a catalog p...
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Cardinal is an English educator who specializes in French studies, surrealism, symbolism, and psychopathological creation. In the following excerpt, he assesses Breton's poetry as a brilliant e...
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In the essay below, Bohn relates "Femme et Oiseau" to its corresponding Miró painting in order to demonstrate that the poems in Constellations are not descriptive but rather they ...
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This excerpt was taken from Balakian's introduction to an issue of Dada/Surrealism that was devoted entirely to Breton. Balakian offers an overview of Breton's major poems and his best-k...
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In the following excerpt, Metzidakis analyzes Breton's extraordinary use of language in Poisson soluble.
Although the term "surrealist" has come to be applied to many different ki...
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Critical Essay by Roger Cardinal
To behave irrationally, amorally, and therefore purely, was one of the ideals of early surrealism. No one was so adapted to living an authentic surrealist life as the ...
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Critical Essay by Jean-pierre Morel
From at least three viewpoints, quite as inseparable as art and life usually are for the surrealists, Breton affirms the importance of dreams: to the poet, painter,...
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Critical Essay by Anna Balakian
Regardless of what other surrealist colleagues have done with the basic premises of surrealism, Breton's own major statements were without ambiguity, and he adhe...
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In the following essay, Balakian discusses André Breton's disregard for artificial stimulants in favor of the "natural intoxicants" of the human mind and the use he made of t...
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André Breton
Andre Breton
