Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with new forms of writing to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton (1896–1966), the movement proposed that modern life had constricted human freedom. The solution was to reanimate the imagination through poetic activity.
Poetry can restore the imagination to its rightful place because, in the view of the Surrealists, poetry properly understood primarily communicates at the subconscious level, the part of us being suppressed. If, as Freud theorized, the subconscious speaks in dreams, poetry was similar in that it let the subconscious break into our awareness by language and image.
But most modern individuals have had the poetry trained out of them, taught to read and write in a rationalistic way. By surrendering control of the writing process to forces deep within or beyond us, we can make space for the subconscious to speak. The Romantics used Nature (those sublime Swiss Alps) to stir the imagination to poetic heights, but the repressed young men (mostly) of 1920s polluted European cities did not. So they invented experimental methods for accessing the subconscious. The most important of these were:
automatic writing
chance based methods
collaborative writing
found poetry
These methods have influenced how we think of writing. Here are just a few concepts and movements you’ve likely heard of that we’ve inherited from Surrealism:
Freewriting: Almost every writing curriculum, retreat, or how-to book now starts relies heavily on the concept of freewriting, which comes from Breton’s automatic writing.
Prompts and Rule-Based Writing: The idea that a worthwhile draft could be generated from an arbitrary set of instructions comes from the Surrealists’ interest in chance as a force that could be harnessed in the creative process. For them, the important question was not whether the universe was fundamentally orderly or chaotic (like good modernists, they were mostly agnostic); rather, the issue was how what seems to be chance, randomness, or arbitrariness could be used as a source of freedom and creative energy. By rejecting the Romantic notion of writing as expressing a poet’s original genius, writers using prompts could embrace the lowered stakes and reach spontaneous and improvisation flow states. After all, who really writes a piece when some elements are selected randomly, collaboratively, or blindly? What you write, in this sense, doesn’t have to mean something about you. Prompts and chance-based methods have freed a multitude authors from writer’s block.
Writing As Fun: For the above reasons, Surrealism restored a sense of fun to writing and creativity in general. Undoubtedly most of us have experienced conditions that make writing no fun (college essays!). Surrealism aimed to restore the joy of poetry.
Surrealist Art and Film: Surrealism has transformed visual art and film. The collage and montage techniques translated the energy of surrealism into these formats. Some Surrealist painters in particular have become so well-known they are now the cultural icons of surrealism, even though the poets were really the pioneers.
Poetry movements: Some of the poetry movements that were substantially influenced by Surrealism include Negritude, The Beats, The Deep Image poets, The New York School, and Magic Realism. Most of your favorite American poets since the 1960s have the imprint of Surrealism on their work.
![Surrealist Art (Redon, Les Origines — Plate 2;Tanguy, "The Satin Tuning Fork"; Carrington, "Bird Bath"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b8941f3-384c-4679-b638-571f61db474b_1718x2083.jpeg)
![Surrealist Art (Redon, Les Origines — Plate 2;Tanguy, "The Satin Tuning Fork"; Carrington, "Bird Bath"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F965f8ca5-9611-4ae7-8873-04958328b974_1228x1500.jpeg)
![Surrealist Art (Redon, Les Origines — Plate 2;Tanguy, "The Satin Tuning Fork"; Carrington, "Bird Bath"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff5370f37-9982-4e0f-852a-29449f105ea8_1845x2400.jpeg)
Cool But, Like, What Makes a Poem Surrealist, Actually?
It’s complicated—and that’s what this site is all about. But here’s a few pointers:
(1) Surrealist writing is unrestricted by reason. Surrealism claims we are free to write anything. Never ask, “Does it make sense?” Not while you’re writing. Only later, if ever. And the writing should be spontaneous, unplanned. Often, the drafting should be done at higher speeds, because “speed-drafting” overrides the temptation to censor what you write. That censoring voice is the voice of reason, which you are trying to avoid. “But,” you may wonder, “if I can’t plan ahead or filter myself, what guides the writing?” It depends on the method being used (automatic, chance procedures, etc.), but the overarching principle is to write from desire. This does not mean emotions. (In fact, surrealism, in my view, is against Confessional and “emotivist” poetry.) We all have this poetic desire in us. It is an erotic appetite for life and beauty, a hunger for reality, an active faculty or muscle working in you, expressing itself by reaching out toward beauty. (Although the nature of desire forces us to speak in terms of “subject” and “object” at first, poetic sight guarantees we will not end up in this binary.)
(2) Surrealist writing is characterized by surreal images. Think of the surrealist image as a metaphor that does not seem to make sense because its terms are contradictory or highly unlikely. (Nerds may care to compare catachresis.) It forces together disparate objects without adequately explaining the nature or intent of the comparison. Breton’s oft-quoted example, from Lautréamont:
…As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.
The nouns and verbs in this statement do not refer to a coherent situation, at least not one that’s ever been seen by anyone, likely. How can something be compared to something that no one really knows about? It’s beyond experiential knowledge and rational compression. Another example from Breton’s “Free Union”:
My wife… whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger.”
This image could not have come to Breton through a reasoned process or direct experience. Somehow his subconscious created it from disparate elements of his imagination. In retrospect it can be analyzed and given a kind of logic (one student proposed that the otter’s waist, pinched by the tiger’s jaws, would resemble a woman’s hourglass waist), but this is back-formed after the image was made without being understood. Surreal images give an initial (delightful) “shock” effect, but on reflection feel “right” or “true.” Willard Bohn argues that surreal images are analogies whose parallels are hidden. And Allen Ginsberg has said, “All surreal images end up being true eventually.”
(3) Surrealist writing leans into contradiction. The Surrealists liked surreal images because they create an anarchic energy that, they felt could break them out of their bourgeois mould. Logic was the enemy. In modern society it had become the language of the marketplace, politics, and academic criticism. It hid reality behind a false screen. The real world, when it managed to break through the screen, looked illogical.
“The Marvelous is the irruption of contradiction within the real.”
–Louis Aragon
In its pursuit of contradiction, Surrealist writing often gets mistaken with Absurdism. But Surrealism’s goal is not to say the world is absurd but to show its fundamental unity. When we break through the artifice of logic, we find everything has relationship with everything else—what seems like contradiction to our logic-trained brains is actually a kind of knowledge we don’t understand.
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Poems to Get You Started
Surrealism is easier to understand by reading the poetry (the theory helps, but in small doses). Here are some poems selected for their clarity as illustrations and by no means represent the limits of surrealist writing:
“Free Union” by Andre Breton (the OG Surrealist)
“The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three” by Tristan Tzara (an OG Surrealist)
“Some Questions,” W.S. Merwin (An example of surrealism influenced by the Deep Image” movement.)
“The Illuminated Egg” by Eric Baus (An example of contemporary surrealism.)
Free Union
by Andre Breton
My wife whose hair is a brush fire
Whose thoughts are summer lightning
Whose waist is an hourglass
Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer
The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut
Whose tongue is an incredible stone
My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child
Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows
My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs
With steam on the windows
My wife whose shoulders are champagne
Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice
My wife whose wrists are matches
Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts
Whose fingers are fresh cut hay
My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit
And Midsummer Night
That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails
Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea
And a fusion of wheat and a mill
Whose legs are spindles
In the delicate movements of watches and despair
My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders
Whose feet are carved initials
Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks
My wife whose neck is fine milled barley
Whose throat contains the Valley of God
And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom
My wife whose breasts are of night
And are undersea molehills
And crucibles of rubies
My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses
Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight
Is a giant talon
My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight
With a back of quicksilver
And bright lights
My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and white chalk
And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk
My wife with the thighs of a skiff
That are lustrous and feathered like arrows
Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock
And imperceptible balance
My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax
Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring
My wife with the sex of an iris
A mine and a platypus
With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candles
My wife with the sex of a mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes that are purple armour and a magnetized needle
With eyes of savannahs
With eyes full of water to drink in prisons
My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the axe
My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire
The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three
where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica mad : the zigzags crack
telephone
bite the rigging liquefy
the arc
climb
astral
memory
towards the north through its double fruit
like raw flesh
hunger fire blood
Some Last Questions
by W.S. Merwin
What is the head
a. Ash
What are the eyes
a. The wells have fallen in and have
Inhabitants
What are the feet
a. Thumbs left after the auction
No what are the feet
a. Under them the impossible road is moving
Down which the broken necked mice push
Balls of blood with their noses
What is the tongue
a. The black coat that fell off the wall
With sleeves trying to say something
What are the hands
a. Paid
No what are the hands
a. Climbing back down the museum wall
To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will
Have left a message
What is the silence
a. As though it had a right to more
Who are the compatriots
a. They make the stars of bone
The Illuminated Egg
by Eric Baus
The word moon assembled its intestines inside the king's saliva. The letters cried. The birth of each letter contained one hundred films. The merged nerves dropped to the ground. The arrows were injured by what the speech spread. The microphone was looking for an echo to explain. The picture of the burst tongue offended the crowd. The birth cloud reddened between rains. The city's moan drowned underneath the first growls. The voice atomized the line between the children's clinging hands.
If at moments in the above poems you felt like your head had been cut off (as Emily Dickinson described the feeling of reading a good poem), you have experienced surrealism.
Does Surrealism only include this weird-ass poetry?
No. Surrealism was adopted, reimagined, and developed by many different poets and movements in various countries and decades. As I will discuss in my next article, despite the polemics and manifestos, Surrealism is committed to poetic dimension of life and thus in principle is open to a wide range of poetic traditions.
Surrealism has become so ubiquitous that it is now largely misunderstood. And when you start looking into it, it can be confusing, radical, and strange. But for writers and anyone interested in modern life, it is essential reading. This site is an invitation to discover its secrets.
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I loved this break down of surrealism, brilliantly put in perspective! 👏🏼