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Paul Eluard |
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Biography |
Born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel in Saint-Denis, Paris, Paul Eluard was raised in a lower middle class family--his father was a bookkeeper and his mother made desses to supplement the family income. He contracted tuberculosis while still a teenager, and was sent to a sanatorium where he started reading Walt Whitman and began to write his first poems. Later, in 1918, he was introduced to Breton and Aragon. Eluard later rejected surrealism and aligned himself with the Communist party. In 1924 Eluard disappeared for 7 months, and when he returned he explained he had taken a trip to Tahiti, Indonesia, and Ceylon--a journey that was later compared to the travels of Rimbaud or the artist Paul Gaugin. After publishing 70 books, Eluard died in 1952 and had a funeral organized by the Communist Party in Charenton-le-Pont. |
Poems |
L'aube impossible
Le grand enchanteur est mort! et ce pays d'illusion s'est effacé (Young)
C'est par une nuit comme celle-ci que j'ai cueilli sur la verdure perpendiculaire des framboises blanches comme du lait, du dessert pour cette amoureuse de mauvaise volonté. C'est par une nuit comme celle-ci que j'ai régné sur des rois et des reines alignés dans un couloir de craie! Ils ne devaient leur taille qu'à la perspective et si les premiers étaient gigantesques, les derniers, au loin, étaient si petits que d'avoir un corps visible, ils semblaient taillés à facettes. C'est par une nuit comme celle-ci que naquit de mon sang une herbe noire redoutable à tous les prisonniers. Première du monde
Captive de la plaine, agonisante folle, |
Themes |
Although Eluard was one of the early founders of Surrealism, he later rejected the movement and aligned himself and his writing with the Communist party. He was prolific, publishing over 70 books during his lifetime including poetry, nonfiction works on literature and politics, and texts about painters. His philosophy on poetry, though, was quite influential. He believed that a word never explains an object; therefore the poem must work to articulate what language cannot. He expressed that to seize poetic matter you must kill it, and that ultimately nothing is won from such an enterprise because the machine is broken. Though he wrote very often about love, he avoided most of the typical banalities and included sensual imagery and body imagery in his work. Like Hugo he saw his art as a direct communication with the public, in order to guide them to a more complete understanding of the human condition. He was famous for saying that we "love to be true to life," which was his personal counsel for universal harmony. |
Bibliography |
Benoit, Leroy J. "POETIC THEMES OF PAUL ELUARD." Modern Language Quarterly 12.2 (June 1951): 216. Feeser, Andrea. "Picasso and Éluard." Men & Masculinities 6.1 (July 2003): 31. Hochman, Hugh. "WHERE POETRY POINTS: DEIXIS AND POETRY'S 'YOU' IN ÉLUARD AND DESNOS." French Studies 59.2 (Apr. 2005): 173-188. |
Hugo :: Baudelaire :: Rimbaud :: Mallarmé :: Valéry :: Apollinaire :: Tzara :: Breton :: Aragon :: Eluard :: Desnos :: Home