Paul Éluard

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Eluard, Paul (pseud. of Eugène Grindel) (1895-1952). ‘De l'horizon d'un homme à l'horizon de tous’—this famous line gives a clue to the wide appeal which makes Eluard a truly European poet, alongside Rilke, Montale, or Lorca, and one of France's best-known 20th-c. writers. For him the poet was above all a mediator: ‘J'établis des rapports … entre ma solitude et toi.’ Poetry could confine itself at times to mediating between the ecstasies or vicissitudes of the lover and the world of everyday communication, or even to becoming simply the extension of love at its most intensely sensual: ‘D'une grande écriture charnelle j'aime.’ But for much of his career Eluard saw his writing as mediating between the personal and the political—La Vie immédiate and La Rose publique, to borrow the titles of two of his collections, from 1932 and 1934 respectively.

Surrealism played a decisive part in Eluard's poetic orientation. The son of prosperous lower-middle-class parents from the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, he turned to poetry when ill health, which dogged him all his life, led to long spells in Swiss sanatoria (1912-13). The meeting with Gala (Lettres à Gala, 1984), a fiery Russian who was to be his first wife and muse, and the experience of working as a nurse during World War I provided inspiration for his early work, but it was the encounter with Paulhan, Breton, and Aragon in 1919, and participation in Dada, then Surrealist, activities in the 1920s, which gave Eluard's work the tonality it was to retain until his early death in 1952. Whole-heartedly committed to the Surrealist programme—liberation of the unconscious, celebration of desire, appeal to the marvellous in everyday life—Eluard usually refrained from ideological pronouncements and never entirely espoused Surrealist methods. The poems of Capitale de la douleur (1926) and L'Amour la poésie (1929) are Surrealist in their linguistic freedom, their lack of immediate referential anchorage, the radicalism of their lyric charge, but they are also classical by dint of economy, purity of diction, and syntactical control. Rather than flamboyant imagery, Eluard's Surrealist poetry derives its energy from an incomparable virtuosity in repetition and variation, juxtaposition and ellipsis, phrasal modulation and rhythmic fluidity. Very much an individualist, he participated fully none the less in the collective side of Surrealism, often collaborating with others: Ralentir travaux (1930), poems written à trois with Breton and Char; L'Immaculée Conception (1930), where he and Breton attempted to replicate the verbal symptoms of various mental disorders. Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), with Max Ernst, was the first of many collaborations with painters (Picasso, Man Ray), to whom he also devoted many poems and some interesting essays (Donner à voir, 1939).

Eluard subscribed fully to the Surrealist view that moral or religious constraints should not interfere with sexual freedom, and his biographers report numerous liaisons in addition to the relationships explicitly celebrated in his poems: with Gala (who deserted him for Salvador Dali), then Nusch (whose sudden death in 1946 left him devastated), Jaqueline (Corps mémorable, 1947), and finally Dominique—Le Phénix (1951). Strongly linked to the cult of woman and the feminine, another Surrealist trait, love permeates Eluard's poetic universe, and the ‘Je-Tu’ relationship is the linchpin of poem after poem. Transmuted into poetry, Eluardian love becomes an infinite set of variations involving the same basic ingredients—the four elements, eyes, reflections, parts of the (female) body. Far from providing stability, however, love is presented as a dynamic process, a generative dialectic involving dark moments as well as epiphanies.

The expansive movement whereby love opens vistas beyond the purview of the solitary individual provides, in poetic terms at least, the bridge between love and politics. The injustice of economic deprivation (that of the French worker in the 1930s) or political dispossession (that of the Spanish republicans from 1936, whose struggle Eluard actively supported) could be represented as severing men and women from the replenishing power of love. In the course of the 1930s the increasing ascendancy of socio-political consciousness in Eluard's poetry does not greatly alter its rhetorical or thematic nature. Along with other Surrealists he had joined the Communist Party in 1927, and been expelled in 1933. His rapprochement with the Party in 1938 led to a definitive break with Breton, but paved the way for the important role Eluard was to play during the Occupation as organizer for the Comité National des Écrivains, anthologist of clandestine poetry, and poet actively committed to the resistance effort (his poem ‘Liberté’, widely distributed as a tract, is one of the most famous of the period). Somewhat more controversially Eluard travelled widely on behalf of international Communism after the war, and his Poèmes politiques blemish his work in certain eyes. Some of his finest love poems, however, also date from this time.

[Michael Sheringham]

Bibliography

• M. Jean, Paul Eluard (1965)
• J.-C Gateau, Paul Eluard et la peinture surréliste (1982)
• N. Boulestreau, Paul Eluard (1985)