SOURCE: "Semiosis and Intertextuality in Breton's 'Femme et Oiseau,'" in The Romanic Review, Vol. LXXVI, No. 4, November, 1985, pp. 415-28.

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 represent Breton's subjective reaction to Miró's paintings.

In 1958 André Breton wrote twenty-two prose poems inspired by a series of gouaches that Joan Miró had created nearly twenty years earlier. Collected the following year in Constellations, each poem was juxtaposed with the appropriate painting in a mathematical progression based on skill and chance, intention and accident. If, as Anna Balakian states, "Breton's Constellations is a cosmic venture in which man joins nature through his manipulation of language" ["From Poisson Soluble to Constellations: Breton's Trajectory for Surrealism," Twentieth Century Literature, 21, February, 1975], the same may be said of Miró's paintings...