Paul Eluard
Eugène-Émile-Paul Grindel (Saint-Denis, December 14, 1895 - Charenton-le-Pont, November 18, 1952), known as Paul Éluard, was a French poet who significantly cultivated Dadaism and Surrealism.
Biography
After a happy childhood, he was affected by tuberculosis that forced him to interrupt his studies.
During World War I he was mobilized as a nurse. In the Davos sanatorium (Switzerland) he met Gala, whom he married in 1917, and began to write his first poems. His first book, published at the end of the war, was Duty and Restlessness (1917). In 1918, Jean Paulhan discovered him and assisted him throughout his life. He introduced him to André Breton and Louis Aragon, with whom he had a very deep but also conflictive relationship throughout his life (always around communism). He joined the Dadaist group in Toulon. His contribution to Dada began before his arrival in Paris. Since Tristan Tzara was still in Zurich, they jointly published four posters, which were distributed throughout the city in 1,000 copies each.
After a marital crisis, he began a tour of the world that ended in 1924. His poems from that time (L'Amour la poésie) are the testimony of a difficult time: tubercular relapse and separation de Gala, which became the Egeria of Salvador Dalí on the occasion of a joint vacation for the two couples in Dalí's house in Cadaqués, now a museum.
In 1926 he published Capitale de la douleur, which established him as a leading poet. In 1933 a crisis occurred with his exclusion from the French Communist Party, to which he had joined in 1926. Ten years later, in the midst of World War II, he returned to the clandestine party. In 1934 he married Nusch Éluard, a model for Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, "the mascot, the girl of the surrealists." Political disagreements distanced him from the Surrealist group in 1938. During World War II he was mobilized and developed his activity in the resistance.
He decided, above all, to fight with words. In the poem Liberté (1942) the genius emerged from him; he transformed a light and sublime love poem into a cry of protest and commitment that forced him to go into hiding. Since then, his words have addressed, in a more radical way, militant and committed themes, to which the extreme formal conciseness of his style endowed them with greater impact.
In 1943, together with Pierre Seghers, François Lachenal and Jean Lescure, he collected the texts of many poets of the French Resistance, which he published in Les Editions de Minuit under the title: L'honneur des poètes.
After Nusch's untimely death, he found his last love, Dominique, and dedicated his book Le Phénix to her, a transition between the horror of Nusch's long decline and the rebirth for Dominique's love, in which the themes of death, doubt and despair are directly opposed to life, love, sensuality and the flesh.
He died in 1952 as a result of a myocardial infarction, and is buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Work
Different stages can be identified in his work:
Dadaist period
He began his career within the avant-garde of the 1920s, in the company of André Breton and Louis Aragon. Within the dadaist aesthetic he published
- Duty and concern (Le devoir et l'inquiétude(1917),
- Les animaux et leurs hommes (1920)
- The misery of the immortals (Les malheurs des immortels(1922).
Surreal stage
Once surrealism was launched, he became one of its most important figures and contributed to the movement works such as
- Die not to die (Mourir de ne pas mourir(1924),
- Les dessous d'une vie ou la pyramide humaine (1926),
- Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of pain)
- Freedom or love (1927),
- Immediate life (The vie immédiate(1932),
- The rose publish (1934),
- The poetic evidence (1937)
- Natural course (Cours naturel(1938).
- Abbreviated Dictionary of Surrealism (1938)
In 1930 he wrote in collaboration with André Breton The Immaculate Conception, a curious book of prose poems in which he imitates various mental illnesses, in the vein of Dalí's paranoid-critical method. He seduced Éluard's wife, Gala, which caused the poet a depression that led him to disappear from public life for several months.
Communist period
- Poetry and truth (Poésie et vérité(1942),
- Le livre ouvert (1942),
- Pablo Picasso (1944),
- Au rendez-vous allemand (1945),
- Une longue réflexion amoureuse (1945),
- Poésie interrompue (1946),
- Souvenirs de la maison des fous (1946),
- Le dur désir de durer (1946),
- Le temps déborde (1947),
- Poèmes politiques (1948),
- Memorable Corps (1948),
- Une leçon de morale (1949),
- Tout dire (1951),
- Le Phénix (1952),
- Derniers poèmes d'amour (1963). (Gasps: Une longue réflexion amoureuse, Le dur désir de durer, Le temps déborde, Memorable Corps and Le Phénix. Spanish version of Jesus Munarriz. Bilingual edition. Madrid, Editions Hiperión, 2005. ISBN 978-84-7517-835-6)