20th century French Surrealist poet
Paul Éluard (1895–1952), born Eugene Émile Paul Grindel, was a French poet instrumental in the Surrealist movement, which he later abandoned for the French Communist Party. The more than seventy books he published included poetry, literary and political works. During his lifetime, he married three times and befriended other surrealists such as Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. He died in Charenton-le-Pont in 1952.
This collection of poems by the great French poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952) was first published in a clothbound edition in 1951. Associated in earlier years with Surrealism, Eluard’s unique verbal sensuousness, combined with his controlling feel for basic form and increasing political commitment, carried him far beyond the confines of any one movement. Active in the French Resistance during World War II, he wrote and helped circulate clandestine pamphlets without regard to his own safety. His poems of this period, among his finest, gave welcome comfort to the oppressed throughout occupied France. This volume, however, surveys the whole of Eluard’s lifetime work, with the most important poems selected from each of his many collections. The original French texts appear on facing pages; readers, even those not well acquainted with the language, are urged to read them aloud and so experience the pleasure of their essential music, and indeed, the deep physicality intrinsic to Eluard’s verse.
