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Andre Breton
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Andre Breton Poems
- Less Time Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than ...
- Freedom Of Love (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)...
- Always For The First Time Always for the first time Hardly ...
- The Spectral Attitudes I attach no importance to life I pin ...
- Le Verbe Être
- Tournesol La voyageuse qui traverse les Halles à la ...
- Postman Cheval We are the birds always charmed by you from ...
a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
Biography
Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume... more »
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Quotations
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''Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.''
André Breton (1896-1966), French surrealist. Mad Love, ch. 3 (1937, trans. 1987). -
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on ever...
André Breton (1896-1966), French surrealist. Mad Love, ch. 1 (1937, trans. 1987). -
''It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.''
André Breton (1896-1966), French Surrealist. repr. In Manifestoes of Surrealism (1969). Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). -
''Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.''
André Breton (1896-1966), French surrealist. Nadja (1928). -
''Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.''
André Breton (1896-1966), French surrealist. Nadja (1928).
Less Time
Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything,
there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some
others; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I've
kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for
if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the
re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I ...
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'' L'amour est toujours devant vous. Aimez. ''
Love is always before you. Love it.
(André Breton)