SOURCE: "Savage and Civilized," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4230, April 27, 1984, p. 450.

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 exploration of the power of language.

Towards the end of his life, André Breton published a tiny book as his poetic testament. Le La consists simply of four enigmatic sentences which popped into Breton's mind while he was on the verge of sleep. Such samples of preconscious language are presented as touchstones of the poetic, inasmuch as they spring unmediated from the source and stimulate the incantatory process of surrealist automatism. These four brief phrases from the 1950s are the direct descendants of that celebrated dream-phrase of 1919 which first made Breton think about doing automatic writing: "Il y a un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre".

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