Last reviewed: June 2017
French poet, novelist, and founder of the surrealist movement.
February 19, 1896
Tinchebray, France
September 28, 1966
Paris, France
The literary career of critic and poet André Breton, like those of many of his contemporaries, was a search for new forms of art. Originally a medical student, he entered the literary world in 1919 as cofounder of the magazine Littérature. Under his leadership, the magazine quickly became a major voice in the Dada movement. Breton became disenchanted with Dada, however, and in 1921 he officially founded the surrealist movement. His poetry and critical writings provide the major statements of literary surrealism. Breton’s three manifestos of surrealism (1924, 1930, and 1942) gave an aesthetic base to the movement. In his first manifesto, Breton announced his credo: “I believe in the final resolving of these two states of mind, dream and reality apparently so contradictory, in a kind of absolute reality, of sur-reality.” The poet’s insistence on narrow limits to the concerns of surrealism, however, ultimately proved too restrictive.
During the 1920s Breton embraced communist political ideology, and for a number of years he was its chief artistic spokesperson. He broke with communism in 1935, however, and his critical work Position politique du surréalisme (Political position of surrealism, 1935) states that propagandistic and didactic aims defeat artistic impulses. Breton took refuge in the United States from 1940 until 1946, and while there he wrote the Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou nont (Prolegomena to a third manifesto of surrealism or not, 1942), in order to defend his movement from charges that it was an old-fashioned and outmoded remnant of a past epoch. However, the promised third manifesto was never issued to the public. André Breton with Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938.
xlink:href="cwa-12779810000667-150870.jpg"/>
Breton’s poetry, like his critical writings, is marked by his determination to promulgate the principles of surrealism—namely, to overthrow all traditional values based on reason in a “revolution” of rethinking reality, which would include exploring the unconscious and admitting the supreme importance of “desire.” His early medical training in Freudian psychology led to a reliance on poetry written at the prompts of the subconscious, unformed and unshaped by any conscious effort on the part of the writer; it was often, in fact, composed by several surrealists working simultaneously. Other paths to the new knowledge were through dreams and experiments in the occult.
In 1928 Breton published his only true novel, Nadja (1928; Nadja, 1960), a story of consuming love (always of great importance to the surrealists) in which the beloved Nadja possesses occult powers and finally goes insane. The action is marked by coincidence, another element important to surrealist expression. Although he was lionized in his later years, Breton’s importance as an innovator lies in his poetry and in the influential criticism he wrote during the 1920s and 1930s.