Paul ÉLUARD (1895-1952). Autograph manuscript; 12 pages in-4 - Lot 202

Paul ÉLUARD (1895-1952). Autograph manuscript; 12 pages in-4, in pencil and black ink. Lecture on surrealist poetry. The manuscript contains numerous erasures and corrections. Éluard wants to demonstrate that poets are now "deeply embedded in the life of other men, in common life". Poetry "has always [...] applied itself to refusing to serve an order that is not its own. [...] Pure poetry? The power of poetry will purify men, all men". Imagination "never lies [...] The poet is the one who inspires much more than the one who is inspired [...] For the poet, everything is an object of sensation, and therefore of feeling. The concrete becomes the food of his imagination". Surrealist poetry is expressed through words, but also through painting: "Surrealist painters, who are poets, are always thinking of something else. The unusual is familiar to them, premeditation unknown". They join imagination to nature, considering "all that is possible as real, to show us that there is no dualism between imagination and reality". Those who do not understand Surrealist poetry, written or painted, and are indignant, "are the same as those who tortured Galileo, burned the books of Swift and Rousseau"...He dwells at length on the Marquis de Sade, "who wanted to give back to civilized man the strength of his primitive instincts, and wanted to free the amorous imagination from its own objects. He believed that from there, and only from there, would equality be born". And Sade, "justifying the men who bring singularity to the things of love, rises up against all those who recognize it as indispensable only to perpetuate their filthy race. [...] It is his perfect pessimism that gives him the coldest reason. Surrealist poetry, the poetry of all time, has never achieved anything else. These are the dark truths that appear in the work of true poets, but they are truths, and almost everything else is a lie. Sade and Lautréamont, "those two fantastic and revolutionary writers" of whom we have no portrait, led the fight "against all the traps set for us by the false reality that demeans man. To the formula: 'You are what you are', they added: 'You can be something else'". For Éluard, "surrealism, which is an instrument of knowledge, of acquisition [...] works to reduce the differences that exist between men, and to do this, it refuses to serve an absurd order based on inequality, deceit and cowardice". From surrealism to communism, there's only one step: with Max Ernst, his enemy in 1917, who became his friend in 1925, he supports "the French Communist Party's slogan of fraternization" and fights "against our common enemy, the International of profit. [...] Poets worthy of the name, like proletarians, refuse to be exploited. [...] True poetry is included in everything that frees man from that appalling good which has the face of death". Poetry is everywhere, in the work of Sade, Picasso, Rimbaud or Freud, in the invention of radio, in strikes and revolutions. Poets have gone "into the streets, they have insulted their masters, they no longer have gods, they dare to kiss beauty and love on the mouth, they have learned the songs of revolt of the unhappy crowd and, without being put off, try to teach them their own"...