Paul Éluard  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 12:09, 8 April 2021; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

"There is another world, but it is in this one."

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Paul Éluard (14 December 1895 – 18 November 1952), was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement.

During World War II, he was the author of several poems against Nazism that circulated clandestinely. He became known worldwide as The Poet of Freedom and is considered the most gifted of French surrealist poets.

His poems in The Capital of Pain inspired the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film Alphaville.

Another world

Surrealist poet Paul Eluard once said, "Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci." This translates as "There is another world, but it is in this one."

Biography

He was born in Saint-Denis, just outside of Paris. At age 16, after a happy childhood, Éluard contracted tuberculosis and interrupted his studies. He met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, whom he married in 1917, in the Swiss sanatorium of Davos. Together they had a daughter named Cécile.

Around this time Éluard wrote his first poems. He was particularly inspired by Walt Whitman. In 1918, Jean Paulhan “discovered” him and introduced him to André Breton and Louis Aragon. This was his introduction to the Surrealist movement.

After a marital crisis, he travelled, returning to France in 1924. His poems of this time reflect his difficulties during the period, in which he had another bout of tuberculosis and separated from Gala when she left him for Salvador Dalí.

In 1934, he married Nusch (Maria Benz), a model of friends Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, who was considered somewhat of a mascot of the surrealist movement. During World War II, he was involved in the French Resistance. He battled also with his poems, such as his 1942 poem Liberty and Les sept poèmes d'amour en guerre (1944). His work was quite militant, yet simple.

He joined the French Communist Party in 1942, which led to his break from the Surrealists, and he later eulogised Stalin in his political writings. Milan Kundera has recalled he was shocked when he heard of Paul Eluard's public approval of the hanging of Kundera's friend, the Prague writer Zavis Kalandra in 1950.

Later Life

His grief at the premature death of his wife Nusch in 1946 inspired the work "Le temps déborde" in 1947. The principles of peace, self-government, and liberty became his new passion. He was part of the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw in 1948, and persuaded Pablo Picasso to also participate.

Eluard met his last wife, Dominique Laure, at the Congress of Peace in Mexico in 1949, and they married in 1951. He dedicated his work The Phoenix to her.

Paul Éluard died from a heart attack in November 1952. His funeral was held in Charenton-le-Pont, and organized by the Communist Party. Pablo Picasso was seated next to Dominique. "In fact," she said later, "it was Éluard who was a friend to Picasso, and the other way around only to the extent that Picasso was capable of friendship." [1]

He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Paul Éluard" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools