Born: Eugene-Emile-Paul Grindel in Paris, France, 14 December 1895. Education: Educated at Ecole communale, Aulnay-sous-Bois, 1901-09; Ecole primaire superieure Colbert, Paris, 1909. Military Service: Served in the French army during World War I and World War II. Family: Married 1) Helene Dimitrovnie (Gala) Diakonova in 1917 (separated 1930), one daughter; 2) Maria Benz in 1934 (died 1946); 3) Dominique Lemor in 1951. Career: Confined in a sanatorium in Davos, 1912-14; leading member of the Surrealist movement between 1919 and 1938; co-founder La Revolution surrealiste, 1924; joined Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, Paris, 1931; worked for the Resistance, from 1942; founder, with Louis Parrot, L’Eternelle Revue, 1944; travelled to Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Poland after World War II. Member: Communist Party, 1927-33, and from 1938. Died: 18 November 1952.
Publications
Collections
Poesies choisies, edited by Claude Roy. 1959. Anthologie Eluard, edited by Clive Scott. 1968.
Oeuvres completes, edited by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler. 2 vols., 1968.
Poemes choisis, edited by Pierre Gamarra and Rouben Melik. 1982.
Oeuvres poetiques completes, edited by Hubert Juin. 6 vols., 1986.
Selected Poems, translated by Gilbert Bowen. 1987.
Ombres et soleil: Shadows and Sun: Selected Writings of1913-1952, translated by Lloyd Alexander and Cicely Buckley. 1995.
The Automatic Message; The Magnetic Fields; The Immaculate Conception by Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Philippe Soupault, translated by David Gascoyne, Antony Melville and Jon Graham. 1997.
Verse
Premiers poemes. 1913.
Le Devoir et l’inquietude. 1917.
Poemes pour la paix. 1918.
Les Animaux et leurs hommes. Les Hommes et leurs animaux. 1920.
Repetitions. 1922.
Les Malheurs des immortels, with Max Ernst. 1922.
Mourir de ne pas mourir. 1924.
152 proverbes mis au gout du jour, with Benjamin Peret. 1925.
Capitale de la douleur. 1926.
Les Dessous d’une vie ou lapyramide humaine. 1926.
L’Amour la poesie. 1929.
A toute epreuve. 1930.
La Vie immediate. 1932.
La Rose publique. 1934.
Facile. 1935.
Nuits partagees. 1935.
Les Yeux fertiles. 1936.
Thorns of Thunder: Selected Poems, edited by George Reavey,translated by Samuel Beckett and others. 1936.
Les Mains libres, illustrated by Man Ray. 1937.
Cours naturel. 1938.
Chanson complete. 1939.
Donner a voir (includes prose). 1939.
Le Livre ouvert 1 (1938-1940). 1940.
Choix de poemes, edited by A. Bosquet. 1941; revised edition, 1946.
Sur les pentes inferieures. 1941.
Le Livre ouvert II (1939-1941). 1942.
Poesie et verite. 1942; as Poetry and Truth, translated by Roland Penrose and E.L.T. Mesens, 1944.
Poesie involontaire, poesie intentionnelle (selection). 1942.
Les Sept poemes d’amour en guerre. 1943.
Dignes de vivre. 1944.
Le Lit, la table. 1944.
Au rendez-vous allemand. 1944; revised edition, 1946.
Pour vivre ici. 1944.
Doubles d’ombre, illustrated by Eluard. 1945.
Lingeres legeres. 1945.
Une longue reflexion amoureuse. 1945.
Poesie ininterrompue I. 1946.
Le Dur Desir de durer. 1946; as Le Dur Desir de durer, translated by Stephen Spender and Frances Cornford, 1950.
Corps memorable. 1947.
Le Temps deborde. 1947.
Choix de poemes, edited by Louis Parrot. 1948.
Poemes politiques. 1948.
Voir: Poemes, peintures, dessins. 1948.
Le Bestiare. 1949.
Une legon de morale. 1949.
Pouvoir tout dire. 1951.
Le Phenix. 1951.
Les Sentiers et les routes de la poesie. 1952.
Poesie ininterrompue II. 1953.
Deux poemes, with Rene Char. 1960.
Dernierspoemes d’amour. 1966; as Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard (bilingual edition), translated by Marilyn Kallet, 1980.
Max Ernst: Peintures pour Paul Eluard. 1969.
Poesies 1913-1926. 1970.
Uninterrupted Poetry: Selected Writings, translated by Lloyd Alexander. 1975.
Poemes de jeunesse, edited by Lucien Scheler and Clavreuil. 1978.
L’Enfant qui ne voulaitpas grandir. 1980.
Other
Les Necessites de la vie et les consequences des reves. 1921.
L’Immaculee Conception, with Andre Breton. 1930.
Appliquee. 1937.
A Pablo Picasso. 1944.
A L’Interieur de la vue. 1948.
Selected Writings, translated by Lloyd Alexander. 1951.
Lettres de jeunesse, edited by Robert D. Valette. 1962.
Anthologie des ecrits sur l’art. 3 vols., 1952-54; 1 vol., 1972.
Le Poete et son ombre: Textes inedits. 1963; revised edition, 1989.
Lettres a Joe Bousquet, edited by Lucien Scheler. 1973.
Lettres a Gala: (1924-1948), edited by Pierre Dreyfus. 1984.
Seconde nature. 1990.
Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, with Andre Breton. 1991.
Translator, Oeuvres choisies, by Christo Botev, 1966.
Critical Studies:
Le Je universal chez Paul Eluard by P. Emmanuel, 1938; Paul Eluard by Louis Perche, 1963; Le Poete et son ombre, 1963, and Eluard: Livre d’identite, 1967, revised edition, 1968, both by Robert D. Valette; Paul Eluard: L’Amour, la revolte, le reve, 1965, and Paul Eluard: Biographie pour une approche, 1965, both by Luc Decaunes; La Poesie de Paul Eluard et le theme de la purete by Ursula Jucker-Wehrli, 1965; Eluard par lui-meme, 1968, and La Poetique du desir, 1974, both by Raymond Jean; Album Eluard by Roger J. Segalat, 1968; The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Eluard and Desnos by Mary Ann Caws, 1970; Le Vocabulaire politique de Paul Eluard by Marie-Renee Guyard, 1974; Paul Eluard by Robert Nugent, 1974; ”Nuits partagees” and The Prose Poem in Eluard by Eric Hill Wayne, 1976; Eluard; ou, le pouvoir du mot by Jean-Yves Debreuille, 1977; Les Mots la vie by C. Guedj, 1980; Eluard; ou, le rayonnement de l’etre by Daniel Bergez, 1982; La Poesie de Paul Eluard: La rupture et lepartage 1913-1936 by Nicole Boulestreau, 1985; Paul Eluard; ou, Le Frere voyant by Jean-Charles Gateau, 1988.
Paul Eluard was a prolific if uneven poet. Between 1916 and 1952 he composed verse and prose poems of astonishing lyrical power and verbal invention. His reputation as a major 20th-century lyric poet rests chiefly on his surrealist love poetry (1924-38) and his Resistance poems (1940-44). He also produced Dadaist poems, surrealist experimental collaborations (with Breton on the Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme [Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism] and on L’Immaculee Conception [The Immaculate Conception]—a linguistic exploration of madness using automatic writing techniques, poetic translations (of Garcia Lorca, Botev), critical writings on poetry, demagogical communist verse, political pamphlets, anthologies of poetry and of writings on art, and scripts for a series of radio broadcasts. The broad trajectory of his work reflects an increasing commitment to militant communism, although many critics feel that his later work does not rise above sentimentality or dogma.
In Eluard’s poetry a language of an amoral sensory world is pitched against that of moral statement. Fighting alongside fellow Surrealists in a crusade against artificially maintained rational categories, Eluard believed that the moral and sensory domains are inseparable. For Eluard there is an immediacy of perception by the self of the world. Moreover, all the world’s objects cooperate in the act of perception by mutually foregrounding each other. Eluard called this idea ”transparence.” This transparency is observed in many of the poems in Capitale de la douleur [Capital of Pain]: ”The space between things has the shape of my words/ . . . The space has the shape of my looks” (from ”Ne plus partager”); ”Tes yeux sont livres a ce qu’ils voient/Vus par ce qu’ils regardent” [Your eyes are delivered to what they see/Seen by what they observe] (from ”Nusch”). Transparency is ensured by the figure of Woman that for Eluard is a principle of Being (”resemblance”).
This myth of seeing is predominant in many of Eluard’s poems presenting the world altered by the radical perception of lovers. However, the proliferation of perspectives and matter created and sustained by Eluard’s vertiginous visual imagery points up a disturbance at the heart of looking. The purity of vision paradoxically requires impurity in the form of dissolved identity. A poem such as ”L’Amoureuse” celebrates the marvellous, yet shows it to be a burden. The full presence of the external world both delights and oppresses: ”Elle est debout sur mes paupieres” (she is standing on my eyelids). The event of looking takes place inside the eye, as experience accrues in an endless set of transparencies. The unsettling nature of this sensory plenitude is in evidence in poems such as ”Le plus jeune” and in many of the poems in ”La vie immediate” and La Rose publique [The Public Rose].
The highly volatile universe of images in the Eluardian sensory world is matched by the equally destabilizing moral diction in the poems. This is as true of Eluard’s first serious political poem ”La Victoire de Guernica,” as in these opening lines from ”Premierement”: ”La terre est bleue comme une orange/Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas” [The earth is blue like an orange/Never an error words do not lie]. The dizzying, and irritating, effect of these lines resides in the way in which both domains collide. The programmatic symmetry here moralizes the sensory, just as the moral is made sensory; the reader witnesses simultaneous substitution and interpenetration.
Such strategies are to be found in Poesie ininterrompue I [Uninterrupted Poetry I], a long poem that demonstrates the full range of Eluard’s poetic language. This extraordinary work, which is at the same time an autobiographical apologia and a poem of the Liberation, grafts surrealist techniques (used long after his objective break with Breton and the Surrealists in 1938) onto a vision of communist utopia. The peculiar rhetoric of this poem presents the paradise experienced by the reader as the next and inevitable evolutionary step for humankind. As elsewhere in Eluard’s work, but here concentrated and refined, the ”linguistic democracy” of Eluard’s syntax reflects his anti-hierarchical views, creating a poetic Marxism in which all classes are dissolved. Paratactic enumeration and sententious aphorism, which Eluard had exploited in earlier poems, gather momentum through hallucinatory verbal incantation. In Poesie ininterrompe I, with its wearisome and elating intertwining of programmatic exhortations and surrealist imagery, Eluard achieved a new kind of poem.
If the themes of Eluard’s love poetry are perennial—purity, passion, the lovers’ look, the world made marvellous by the state of romance, the loneliness experienced in the absence of love—he nevertheless proves to be an unconventional poet, in two essential ways. Firstly, an analysis of his poetic language reveals a specific and idiosyncratic revitalizing of stock, contemporary, diction. A micro-history of the period is detectable in the incestuous surrealist magazines and, during the war, in the echoes and loans of key words in the many Resistance journals to which Eluard subscribed and contributed. Secondly, Eluard promulgated in his poems the belief that love, like poetry itself, was a revolutionary act capable of transforming both perception and societal life. In so doing, the amorous couple is placed at the service of humanity, as an example and a building block for an abundant world.
Although Eluard wrote some execrable verse (”Joseph Staline” for example) at a time (1950) when the French Communist Party was nurturing its cultural mascots, his overall project was not to incorporate Marxist ideas into poems, but to set down his sympathies for victims of social injustice and of the stultification of perception in bourgeois life. To this end, Eluard created a hybrid poetry of moral didacticism and pure lyricism. Not since Hugo has there been such an intriguing conflation of private imagination and public pronouncement in French poetry.
