Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging. He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another. This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a narrative reenactment of a poetic reenactment of the historical avant-gardes: a novel from the 1990s that combines modernist and avant-garde narrative techniques to revisit an experimental poetic group from the 1970s as they reprise and research and recover practices and figures from the 1920s to their present. At the same time that its protagonists investigate forgotten works from the past, they also form a community that generates work in the present tense (“poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry”, as Bolaño put it in a 1976 manifesto), that aims to interrupt the generation of what they see as unproductive forms and practices (incarnated in Octavio Paz and the peasant poets), and that reaches out to a broader international horizon of experimental poetics, primarily Peru and France but also alluding to North American, Argentinean, and Chilean experiments. This article elucidates and unpacks the novel’s handling of these various legacies and affiliations, while also underlining how it points, elliptically but continuously, to what is left out of the record of even the most encompassing histories of the avant-gardes: their female artists, whose legacy here flares up before flowing into the expanded monologue of Amulet.

This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

This chapter focuses on the movement known as Deep Image poetry and traces the origins of this tendency and explores its key characteristics. The chapter discusses Deep Image poetry’s debts to Spanish and Latin American surrealism and other sources and focuses on the work of Robert Bly and, especially, James Wright, in order to sketch out the major features of Deep Image poetics, including its use of images drawn from the unconscious and moments of sudden epiphany.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

In this chapter I offer a reorientation of Thomas Adès’s relationship to surrealism by positioning his music in the context of automatism, wherein surrealism's famed incongruities become legitimate, logical manifestations of our unconscious. This perspective allows us to incorporate works that have not often been understood as surreal, like the Mazurkas studied here. Second, automatisms link Adèsian surrealism to the compositional logic that theorists have uncovered in the past twenty years. And finally, Adès’s automatism suggests a way of composing genuinely surreal music. André Breton, surrealism's founder, thought music was ‘confusing’, and much literature on Adès’s music has established such a connection only by suggesting the music's surreal qualities are found in its painterly traits. I, on the other hand, suggest that through automatism we are able to imagine those marvellous sounds that emerge from logical processes of structured time as themselves fundamentally surreal.

Dreams provided Bishop with a creative resource, a motif, a model, and a literary device in her work, exceeding the contexts of surrealism, psychoanalysis and autobiography in which they have been discussed. While the word “dream” and its variants turn up repeatedly in Bishop’s work, her usage and attitude vary. I argue that dreams in Bishop might best be understood within a literary/aesthetic or cognitive/phenomenological lens. Furthermore, symbolist practices are as pertinent to Bishop’s dream poetry as surrealist practices. This essay explores the nature of “dreaming” in Bishop as a poetic resource, a phenomenal experience and paradigm of imaginative activity. And, quite differently, I acknowledge Bishop’s ambivalence about dreams as a literary device and, more broadly, as a general pursuit of illusions with often precarious personal and social implications.

Although best known as a clear-eyed, realist poet of vivid, precise description, Elizabeth Bishop was powerfully drawn to surrealism, the avant-garde movement devoted to the unconscious, the irrational, and the power of dreams. This apparent contradiction is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bishop’s work and life so fascinating, but it is also one of the most significant and generative. This chapter argues that Bishop’s interest in surrealism is not merely a youthful enthusiasm that she definitively leaves behind. Surrealism struck a deep chord within her and remained a significant element of her poetic toolkit from beginning to end. Bishop’s poems are also not just influenced by surrealism, but in some ways are about it, thematically. She carries on a lifelong debate with surrealism and its implications, composing poems that probe fraught tensions between the unconscious and the conscious mind, between dream and waking, freedom and control.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.

This chapter considers the complex relationship between the amateur British ethnographic movement, Mass-Observation, officially inaugurated in 1937, and surrealist methods, ideas, and images. Surrealism influenced Mass-Observation protagonists such as Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, David Gascoyne, and Julian Trevelyan, although their formal connections with the surrealist movement in poetry and art and their associations with Mass-Observation overlap only partially. After considering these biographical connections, the chapter goes on to discuss the Mass-Observation–surrealism connection through two complementary but distinct lenses of scholarly discussion: cultural and social science scholars who discern surrealist inspiration in Mass- Observation’s methodological approach to everyday phenomena; and literary and art-historical scholars who trace the intertwining of Surrealism with other 1930s artistic and literary trends, such as British documentary film and I. A. Richards’s critical meditations on science and poetry, in the work of Jennings, Madge, and other Mass-Observation principal figures.

Surrealist practice of the early twentieth century anticipates the biopolitics of contemporary animal philosophy. Modern surrealists welcomed Charles Darwin's paradigm shift, moving beyond any bright line that distinguished humans as a species from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surrealism's investment in evolutionary biology – promoted in journals such as Minotaure, Documents, and View – buttressed its political critique of humanist exceptionalism, sovereign individualism, and any ideal telos that defined the origins and destiny of humankind. Although surrealist animal representations frequently lapse into anthropocentric fantasy, surrealist manifestoes, art, poetry, fiction, and drama remain undeniably revolutionary in depicting human/animal hybridity and assailing the oppressive discursive linkages among classism, colonialism, and speciesism. In particular, the later careers of surrealists such as Leonora Carrington look ahead to recent ecofeminist and environmental debates concerning an “ethic of care,” defining kinship and companion networks in a decidedly posthuman community of human and nonhuman animals.

Part III deploys the theories and approaches presented in Parts I and II, along with art historical texts, to develop a new interpretational framework for artworks that make rhythm and matter explicit.

A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were a period of political turbulence and social and cultural change in France. Céline and André Malraux gave voice to right- and left-wing ideologies in their work, while François Mauriac and others offered a religious perspective on contemporary mores. Formal innovations came from Surrealism and modernism, and the voices of female, black and gay writers made themselves heard more boldly than ever before: André Breton, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Colette, Irène Némirovsky and René Maran were significant literary figures of the period. At the same time, cinema and radio challenged the cultural dominance of the novel, and within literature the landscape was changed by the beginnings of the bande dessinée and the burgeoning of mass-market popular fiction, including Delly’s romance novels and Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.

The routes of Caribbean interactions with Africa during the 1950s and 1960s were several and varied: not only did Africa appear in the literature as forms and interrogations of an ideological homeland, but African and Caribbean writers met on European soil, exchanged ideas in conversations with each other, and became part of literary projects fostered through European universities and publishers. During this period, many writers and scholars from across the Caribbean region moved to the newly independent African countries, and engaged with the cultures in their writing and professional and personal lives. Conversely, many African writers turned to the Caribbean for models of how to engage with the cultures of colonialism and their afterlife. This chapter examines the pilgrimage of identity and diaspora enacted through the African–Caribbean connection, the new literary movements that it generated, as well as the shared project of political and cultural decolonization.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

“Cultural Revolutions” examines the politicization of culture around 1968. From Surrealist and Situationist attempts to redefine art as a utopian-socialist enterprise, to the public scandals created by subversive avant-gardes like the Dutch Provos, to the development of popular culture into a new field of youth radicalism centered on rock‘n’roll and new styles of dress and behavior, the chapter shows that the new politics of the 1960s were inseparable from cultural innovations. This synergistic relationship frequently involved attempts to remake the self by reshaping the face of daily life, a goal central both to new aesthetic forms like the Happening and the growth of nonconformist subcultures and countercultures aimed at erasing the distinction between the personal and the political. The creation of local underground “scenes” in which much of the political-cultural work of the 1960s was accomplished was a key expression of this tendency, while the prominence of alternative media practices in and around those scenes highlights the importance around 1968 of efforts to create alternative sources of knowledge outside the mainstream.

“Paris Profanely Illuminated” explores the “Circe” episode’s relation to 1920s Paris. It situates “Circe” at the origins of the Surrealist movement, showing the influence on the episode of the first Surrealist play, Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and the influence of the episode on the first Surrealist novel, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris. Tracing the influence of Joyce’s sentient thinking, it reexamines Benjamin’s reception of Surrealism, uncovering the influence of Joyce’s materially embedded reflection on the literary and conceptual experiments of a theorist who struggles with the nature of theory following the collapse of critical distance. The chapter examines Benjamin’s conceptions, in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” and the Arcades Project, of the profane illumination and the body-image space. It argues for the relevance of the nonrational, sensual modes of engagement Benjamin describes in the Arcades Project for the interpretation of Finnegans Wake.