Paul Éluard

French poet

• Born: December 14, 1895
• Died: November 18, 1952

As one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, Éluard led the way in finding new poetic means of investigating human nature. He was actively interested in the spheres of literature in general and poetry in particular. Éluard’s major contribution to the development of French poetry is his entire poetic work, a blend of avant-garde with classical tradition.

Early Life

Paul Éluard (ay-lwar), who became one of France’s leading lyric poets, was born Eugène Grindel in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. Éluard’s father, Clément-Eugène Grindel, of peasant origin, was an accountant; his mother, Jeanne-Marie Coussin, was a dressmaker. In the early 1900’s, however, realizing that an accountant’s life was financially unrewarding, Grindel senior tried his luck in real estate. Using some of his savings, he bought an empty lot and, after dividing the land into small parcels, sold it for an unexpected profit.

In 1908, encouraged by their financial success, the Grindel family moved to Paris. There young Éluard went to the elementary school on rue Clignancourt, not too far from the parental house. The oppressive monotony of life in that urban-industrial environment was interrupted only during the joyful vacation trips to the countryside, either to the village of Seine-et-Oise, where an aunt had a small farmhouse, or to the family’s own vacation cottage in Aulnay-sous-Bois, near Paris. At the age of thirteen, Éluard was awarded a scholarship to continue his education at the well-known Parisian lycée École Colbert. In 1912, however, he became ill and was forced to interrupt his studies. He left Paris for Clavadel, a Swiss sanatorium near Davos, well known for its advanced treatment of tuberculosis. The years spent at the sanatorium in the Swiss Alps strongly influenced Éluard’s future. Immobilized on the hospital bed, the adolescent began to develop his taste for meditation and solitude. The serene and tranquil Swiss mountains, with their majestic presence, were conducive to the emotional experiences that ultimately influenced Éluard’s future poetic work. The long days in the hospital were brightened by the luminous presence of a young patient, Helene Dimitievna Diakanova, or “Gala.” She was a young Russian student who also was undergoing medical treatment for a pulmonary illness at the Clavadel Sanatorium. Éluard was only seventeen years old when he met Gala and fell in love.

Life’s Work

Love is the central theme of Éluard’s lyric poetry. The aliveness of nature in the village of his childhood, as well as the experiences of his love for Gala, reverberate throughout his first poetic writings. Simply and unpretentiously entitled Premiers poèmes (first poems), this collection of love poems, published in 1913, was followed in 1914 by a book of poems in prose entitled Dialogues des inutiles (dialogues of the useless). Both volumes were published at the author’s own expense and signed with his patronymic: Paul-Eugène Grindel.

In 1914, on the outbreak of World War I, Gala left Switzerland for Russia. In the spring of the same year, Éluard left the Swiss sanatorium and returned to Paris. In October, 1914, he sought to join the army. His request to be enlisted in the infantry was, however, denied because of his chronic rhinopharyngitis. Instead he was assigned to the army’s auxiliary services. In the summer of 1916, he was still in the army, this time working as a military nurse in a field hospital in the Somme region. At his insistence, however, the army reversed its previous decision, and, on October 30, 1916, he was reclassed as suitable for combat duty and sent to join the Ninety-fifth Regiment of Infantry. On February 21, 1917, he married Gala, and a year later their only child, a daughter named Cécile-Simonne-Antonile, was born.

The first poetic work signed with the pen name of Paul Éluard was a small collection of poems entitled Le Devoir et l’inquiétude , written by the author in 1916 during his term of duty as a military nurse and published in 1917. The publication in July, 1918, of his new volume of poems, entitled Poèmes pour la paix , attracted the attention of Jean Paulhan, an influential literary critic, who, impressed with Éluard’s poetic sensibility, published a favorable review. Later, Paulhan became one of Éluard’s closest friends and active supporters.

In May, 1919, Éluard was demobilized. After his return to Paris, at Paulhan’s recommendation he joined André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault and began to take an active part in the newly formed Surrealist movement. Soon Éluard became a constant contributor to the Surrealist literary journal Littérature, published by Breton. Éluard, at an early stage of his poetic development, was an ardent supporter of the literary experiments advocated by the Surrealists. In his short-lived Surrealist newsletter Proverbe, published on February 1, 1920, he advanced Breton’s theory on the power of imagination over all previous forms of formal literary expression.

Éluard’s volume of poems entitled Les Nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rěves (1921; the necessities of life and the consequences of dreams) reflects a strong Freudian influence as well as the poet’s acceptance of Breton’s theory of automatic writing, formulated one year later in Breton’s famous Manifeste du surréalisme (1924; Manifesto of Surrealism, 1969). Numerous poems written by Éluard in the mid-1920’s conjure hallucinatory visions with arresting imagery. Volumes of poems such as Répétitions (1922; repetitions), with illustrations by Éluard’s friend Max Ernst; Mourir de ne pas mourir (dying of not dying), published in 1924; and Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain , 1973) were bursting with Surrealist thoughts and imagery. These collections of verses, followed by Les Dessous d’une vie: Ou, La Pyramide humaine (the reversals of life: or, the human pyramid), a volume of prose published in 1926, brought Éluard the supreme recognition as the poet of French Surrealism.

On March 24, 1924, Éluard unexpectedly left Paris and embarked on a world cruise. The poet’s hasty departure was prompted on the one hand by a growing displeasure with his father’s real estate deals, equated by Éluard with greed and antisocial behavior, and on the other by his growing opposition to the creative rigors imposed by Breton and some of his associates. The trip, perceived by Éluard as a radical means to liberate the unconscious and free him from the financial control of his father and that of Breton’s creative restrictions, ended in Singapore. Éluard sent a letter of explanation to his wife, Gala, and asked her and his friend Ernst to come to Singapore and join him on his return trip to France.

Soon after his return, during the harsh winter of 1928, Éluard suffered a relapse of his pulmonary illness and left for Switzerland for treatment at the Arosa Sanatorium. Éluard’s personal crisis was far from over. At the beginning of 1929, Éluard and Gala took a trip to Cadaquès in Catalonia. There they met Salvador Dalí, whom Éluard had already met in Paris in 1928. Gala was instantly attracted to the flamboyant and extravagant Spaniard. Several months later, after they returned to Paris, Gala asked for a divorce. In December, 1929, Éluard met a young and attractive woman, Maria “Nusch” Bentz. After a long courtship, Éluard married Nusch in 1934. She brought stability to Éluard’s life.

Although one of the prominent Surrealists, Éluard remained a poet of personal feelings and emotions. His poetry neither emulates the intellectual exhibitions of other Surrealists nor succumbs to their psychophysiological theories. Éluard’s early verses expound the poet’s private voice contained in its own loneliness. As early as 1926 in Capital of Pain, under the hallucinatory visions and striking imagery of some of the poems one could decipher a strong yearning for an original poetic expression that later was to fuse his personal loneliness with constant longing for social communion.

It was Éluard’s deep belief that one way out from one’s loneliness is through involvement in social and political activities. In 1927, in search of human brotherhood, Éluard, along with Breton and Aragon, joined the French Communist Party. He became a poète engagé a poet who, through poetry, disseminates political views and tries to liberate other people from bourgeois conventions and social servitude. Nevertheless, Éluard’s political poetry is essentially one of implication rather than of statement.

The fall of 1938 brought an end to the friendship and literary collaboration between Éluard and Breton. Breton came under the influence of Leon Trotsky, and Éluard spoke against Breton’s position, accusing him of betrayal. Éluard’s militancy made him speak out against the injustice of the Spanish Civil War. His poem “La Victoire de Guernica,” written to accompany Pablo Picasso’s famous painting depicting the tragic events of April 27, 1937, sets the anguished problem of the intellectual who tries to identify himself with the innocent victims of the massacre.

At the outset of World War II, Éluard was mobilized. In the fall of 1940, however, Éluard was demobilized and back in Paris, which had fallen to the Germans in May of the same year. In October of 1940, Le Livre ouvert I, 1938-1940 appeared. The lyrics, filled with a deep sense of desolation and despair, reveal Éluard’s continual search for an explanation of the tragedies of war. Some of the poems lack the conventional techniques of poetry; nevertheless, they have a poignant appeal and a strong accent of reality. In January, 1942, Le Livre ouvert II, 1939-1941 was published. The poems, which express extremely delicate nuances of thought and feeling, reverberate with patriotic fervor and revolutionary zeal.

Éluard, deeply committed to the fight “against tyranny,” joined the French underground movement in 1942. During the years of Nazi occupation, together with Aragon, Éluard became known as a poet of the French Resistance . His poem “Liberté,” included in the volume Poésie et vérité (1942; Poetry and Truth, 1942 , 1944), is one of the most powerful poems written on the heroism of the Resistance fighters. Éluard actively participated in the dissemination of a number of clandestine publications such as Les Lettres française, Les Étoiles, and Éditions de minuit. In November, 1943, forced by his illegal activity to change his place of residence constantly, Éluard left Paris for Lozère, where he and his wife found shelter at the psychiatric asylum of Saint Alban. After their return to Paris, in February, 1944, Éluard renewed his activity within the National Writers’ Committee and the Intellectuals’ Union, organizations whose members were affiliated with the French underground movement. After the liberation of France, Éluard’s poetry was widely read and published by major French and foreign literary publications. Already prominent among his peers, fame and international recognition came rather suddenly. Éluard’s postwar poetry did not change; it remained private in tone while retaining its polemical effectiveness. His new collection of poems, Poésie ininterrompue (uninterrupted poetry), published in 1946, expresses pure mood by means of poetic images. The poet meditates on the meanings of work, love, and poetry.

The sudden death of his wife, Nusch, on November 28, 1946, required of Éluard a strong effort of intellectual adjustment. He was continously haunted by the images of death. Nevertheless, despite the prevailing mood of despair, most of his poems written during this period are full of light. The poems of Le Temps déborde (1947; time overflows) alternate hope and despair, light and darkness, love and hatred. The lyricist takes over. Éluard celebrates love as the only hope to find meaning and purpose in life.

For Éluard as for Charles Baudelaire, love was the major source of artistic creativity. Éluard’s marriage to Dominique Lamort, whom he had met during the 1949 Peace Congress in Mexico, revitalized him. Dominique, with her youthful sensuality (she was thirty years old when they married), gave a new meaning to Éluard’s poetic universe. His new wife became his inspiration. In the early 1950’s, Éluard published numerous works, some of which, however, were of questionable poetic value. A volume of poems dedicated to his party comrades was well received only by liberal critics. Le Phénix , a collection of poems published in 1951, concludes the cycle of love poems dedicated to his wives. Le Phénix is the book of Dominique as much as L’Amour la poésie was that of Gala and Les Yeux fertiles (1936) was that of Nusch.

Éluard’s last book of poems was a series of funèbre épigrammes, published in August, 1952. A month later, in September, 1952, Éluard was struck by a new and severe attack of angina. On November 18, he died suddenly in his apartment outside Paris. Éluard was buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery, near the famous Mur des Fédérés among the martyrs of the Commune and French Resistance.

Significance

Éluard’s poetic work is diverse and complex. In many respects it reflects the poet’s personal drama, the ever-present dualism reflected in a perpetual conflict between loneliness and a strong drive for social communion. His perception of loneliness went beyond the Romantic notion of solitude. Unlike the Romantics, Éluard did not find refuge in melancholy and nostalgia to escape reality. He constantly acknowledged the reality that surrounded him, while meeting the demands of his personal inwardness. The ambivalence of Éluard’s philosophy is best reflected in his love poems. Éluard, who along with Aragon and Breton was one of the leading Surrealists, became best known as a love poet. Éluard’s world of intellectual and poetic fantasy reached its peak in his love poems. The subjective, or the reality of self, and the objective, or the reality of the outside world, are fused in his volume of poems Mourir de ne pas mourir. He expressed his doctrine of love, seeing it as an ultimate source of poetic creativity. His treatment of love brought about a poetical renovation of French erotic poetry.

Éluard departed from the Surrealist camp when he believed that the Surrealist aesthetic had become too narrow for his poetic inspiration. His search for identity himself in relation to others led him to militancy. In the late 1930’s, the ideals of social and political justice played an important role in Éluard’s poetry, the dreams and fantasy of his Surrealist period being replaced by an active participation in the political life of France and the world. Éluard’s feelings of solidarity with humankind are best expressed in his poems written during the dark days of the Spanish Civil War. During the German occupation of France, Éluard became an active participant in the underground movement. His militant verse soon gained for him recognition as the poet of the French Resistance. Éluard’s poetic manner, developed during the period of his creative life, was simple in the extreme, with a genius for recording powerful impressions and moods that could sway people to his cause, be it love or the end of the Nazi occupation of France.

Bibliography

Balakian, Anna. “Post-Surrealism of Aragon and Éluard.” In Surrealism and the Road to the Absolute. New York: Noonday Press, 1959. The essay on Éluard represents an extended treatment of various stages in his evolution from Surrealism to political and militant poetry. It also discusses how the changes introduced by Éluard into the poetic themes and techniques of Surrealist aesthetics led to the rift between Éluard and Breton.

Caws, Mary Ann. The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Éluard, and Desons. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970. The chapter on Éluard is a very good analysis of Éluard’s views on love and death as they emerge from the poet’s continuous fascination with the ineffable that transcends the world of appearances. The emphasis is on Éluard’s constant preoccupation with the duality of the world around him.

Eburne, Jonathan P. “Object Lessons: Surrealist Art, Surrealist Politics.” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 1 (January, 2005): 175-181. An analysis of Surrealist art and politics and the place of Éluard’s poetry within that context.

Fowlie, Wallace. “Eluard: The Doctoring of Love.” In Age of Surrealism. 1940. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1972. Discusses the Surrealist treatment of love in poetry, establishing Éluard’s contribution as a poet of intimate feelings. Defines also the Surrealist’s search for poetic purity.

Matthews, J. H. An Introduction to Surrealism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965. The book represents an important study of the history of Surrealism, with emphasis on its aesthetic. It also contains a good analysis of Éluard’s contribution to the development of the Surrealist movement.

Nugent, Robert. Paul Éluard. New York: Twayne, 1974. Part of the Twayne World Authors series, this book provides adequate biographical information about Éluard and some good discussion of his works. Contains a chronology, selected bibliography, notes, and an index.