#Paul eluard capitale de la douleur introduction series#
While in Spain in 1936 for a series of conferences on Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Éluard saw that country erupt into civil war. He took part in Une vague de rêves (A wave of dreams), the first surrealist collective text, collaborated with Benjamin Péret (1899–1959) on 152 proverbes mis au goût du jour (1925 152 tasteful proverbs for today), and with André Breton and René Char (1907–1988) on Ralentir travaux (Slow down - construction ahead), and again with Breton on L'immaculée conception (1930 The immaculate conception). Éluard was immediately and in all ways committed to the group. About the time he returned, Breton published the first of his two major surrealist manifestos. In 1924 the poet went off on a "fugue" that fed rumors about his mysterious disappearance while he traveled around the world. The arrival in Paris of the German painter and sculptor Max Ernst (1891–1976), his friend but also Gala's lover, complicated Éluard's life with conflicting feelings of amity and jealousy. Meanwhile, Éluard continued to work with his father on construction projects in the Parisian suburbs - and to him is owed a street named Rue Jacques Vaché, after one of the early surrealist heroes. Taking as their slogan the imperative to "change life," which was coined by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891), the surrealists engaged in a rebellion against the values that had led to the enormous massacres of the First World War. As Dada gave way to surrealism, Éluard took part in the surrealists' earliest demonstrations. At about the same time, he published Les animaux et leurs hommes, les hommes et leurs animaux (Animals and their men, men and their animals) and in 1921 started a short-lived Dada publication, Proverbe.
Éluard participated in the first public demonstrations of the Paris dadaists and became involved with the magazine ironically called Littérature, founded by André Breton (1896–1966), Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982). Excited with the new literary ideas, Eluard penned Necessites d’une vie et les consequences des reves in 1921, in which he expressed his surrealist ideas, exploring the relationship between dream and reality. Along with Eluard, they became instrumental in developing the surrealist movement.
Some of his acquaintances were Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton, as well as others involved in the Dadaist movement. Ironically, he was serving in one of these trenches when Le Devoir el Vinquietude was published.Īfter the war, Eluard, determined to continue his writing career, began to frequent literary circles. After serving as a hospital orderly, he fought in the trenches. When World War I broke out, Eluard was released from the sanatorium and joined the French military. However, it was while he was a patient at the Swiss sanatorium that he took an interest in poetry and began writing his own verse.
Eluard’s childhood in Saint-Denis, France, was hindered with a bout of tuberculosis that forced him to spend nearly two years in a sanatorium for treatment.