Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
Liberation Then
By Simon Watson Taylor
Manifestoes of Surrealism
by André Breton, translated by Richard Seaver, translated by Helen R. Lane
University of Michigan, 304 pp., $8.50
Selected Poems
by André Breton, translated by Kenneth White
Grossman, 110 pp., $1.50 (paper)
A Bibliography of the Surrealistic Revolution in France
by Herbert S. Gershman
University of Michigan, 57 pp., $4.50
The Surrealist Revolution in France
by Herbert S. Gershman
University of Michigan, 255 pp., $8.50
The Philosophy of Surrealism
by Ferdinand Alquié, translated by Bernard Waldrop
University of Michigan, 196 pp., $5.95
Surrealist Poetry in France
by J.H. Matthews
Syracuse University Press, 240 pp., $9.50
An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry
by J.H. Matthews
University of Minnesota Press, 203 pp., $4.75
The word 'surrealism' is by now comfortably integrated into most people's vocabularies. It seems to provide a useful term for a quality of fascination inherent in the systematized irrationality that has, for example, always been a component of visual comedy, and is now a part of a general awareness of life. But is such generalized usage to be condemned as the extension of a term which is the exclusive trade-mark of an officially constituted aesthetic movement? That has always been the attitude of the movement's exegetes, and the complaint by J. H. Matthews in the Introduction to his Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry is not untypical. In a passage that presents the surrealists, in emotion-laden terms, as the victims of 'misapprehension, incomprehension and misrepresentation,' he states:
Review, 4366 words
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