Poets

Paul Éluard, pseudonym of Eugène Grindel (born Dec. 14, 1895, Saint-Denis, Paris, Fr.—died Nov. 18, 1952, Charenton-le-Pont), French poet, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement with Louis Aragon and André Breton among others and one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century.

Éluard rejected later Surrealism and joined the French Communist Party. Many of his works reflect the major events of the century, such as the World Wars, the Resistance against the Nazis, and the political and social ideals of the 20th-century.

I was born to know you

To give you your name

Freedom.

(in Poèsie et Vérité, 1942)

Paul Éluard came from a lower-middle-class background. He was born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel in Saint-Denis, Paris, the son of a bookkeeper, whose wife helped out with the household bills by dressmaking. Éluard became interested in poetry in his youth in Clavadel, a Swiss sanatorium, where he was sent for treatment of tuberculosis. When he returned to France, he joined the army and was badly injured by gas. His first noteworthy volume of poetry was Le Devoir et l'Inquiétude (1917).

During a leave from the service in 1917, Éluard married a Russian woman, Helena Diakonova, known as Gala, whom he had met in Clavadel. Gala inspired several of Éluard's poems published in Capitale de la douleur (1926, Capital of Pain), which established his reputation as a poet. It includes some of his most famous love poems, such as 'L'Amoureuse' (Woman in Love..