Surrealism has always concerned itself with liberating the mind through language: “nothing less than the rediscovery of the secret of a language whose elements would then cease to float like jetsam on the surface of the dead sea” (297). Surrealism revolts against mainstream writing in an attempt to liberate words and reinvigorate language. In the beginning, this was achieved through “pure psychic automatism” (PPA) in order to locate “the ‘prime matter’ (in the alchemical sense) of language” (299). PPA ceased to be practiced once it achieved its objective so as to not become new “floating jetsam.” Today’s poets should only employ the practice of pure psychic automatism as modeled by Surrealism’s originators. Once the poet knows where to locate the “prime matter” he or she should abandon automatism lest it become over-used and pedestrian. Thus, PPA is a training tool for the neophyte surrealist and will eventually be abandoned since the poet will have located the emancipatory power of the word within the self and will be able to create freely outside of the self.
Therefore, Surreal Poetics seeks to highlight poetry that reinvigorates language, reveals internal discoveries, and pushes linguistic boundaries.
The primacy of the image within Surrealism enabled surrealists to obtain “incandescent flashes” as a result of joining two elements so unrelated from each other that “reason would fail to connect them,” requiring a suspension of critical reasoning in order for the two elements to come together and spark a poetic image (302). As the poet allows his or her thinking to open up to unfamiliar possibilities through the “incandescent flashes,” brought about through the poetic image—with its primary vehicle as the metaphor, an “extraordinary network of sparks [will lead] the mind to have a less opaque image of the world and itself” (302). Therein lies the most poetic freedom: the world will be less opaque to those whose minds can relax and illuminate that which was previously hidden amongst the mundane.
Therefore, Surreal Poetics seeks to highlight poetry that uncovers the marvelous, the convulsive . . . poetry containing images that question and startle, images that clash and sparkle, images that reveal the hidden ever-present . . . images that always keep in mind Breton’s words that “beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all” (Nadja 160).
In the final paragraph of “On Surrealism in Its Living Works,” Breton tells us that Surrealism equips us with the means to understand our place in nature—our existence (within the natural configuration) is neither superior nor inferior to that which surrounds us; Surrealism unleashes that means: “poetic intuition.” Only this poetic intuition “can put us back on the road of Gnosis as knowledge of suprasensible Reality, ‘invisibly visible in an eternal mystery’” (304). Surreal Poetics understands that all existence—physical, spiritual, temporal, spatial, and so on—is an eternal mystery and aims to provide a space for poets to unleash their “poetic intuition” and render the invisible visible through language and the image.
Daren Berton, Editor
*(Breton signed the essay in May of 1953 [here is a digital archive of Breton’s original manuscript with his notations], but it was not published until almost two years later when it appeared in Médium, communication surréaliste, n°4, janvier 1955, 2-4. I quote the English translation in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor Paperbacks edition, 2010, 295-304.)