Glossary of Poetic Terms

Surrealism is an artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris and spread throughout the world in the decades that followed. André Breton outlined his idea of its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Early surrealists were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Through automatic writing and hypnosis, surrealists believed they could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths. The French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Valentine Penrose, and Guillaume Apollinaire embodied early surrealist principles. 

Some contemporaries of the surrealists who did not ascribe to Breton’s manifesto or were not a part of his circle employed similar practices. Surrealist practices were used in the visual arts, particularly in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte, and in the films of Jean Cocteau and Germaine Dulac. A second generation of surrealist writers emerged in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America; see the poems of Joyce Mansour, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Octavio Paz. The surrealist aesthetic has influenced modern and contemporary poets writing in English as well, including Dorothea Tanning, James Tate, John Ashbery, and Michael Palmer.