He began to regard poetry as a means toward radical change in all areas of life, in revealing what is true in the imagination as well as in the world, and to celebrate love as liberating and joyful - ideals that seem to grow naturally from his earlier concerns. Eluard seems to have struck a balance between the conceptual and physical worlds, as evidenced in his works Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle (1942) and Les sept poémes d'amour en guerre (1943). His poems Liberté and Au Rendez-vous Allemand, both written in 1944, were widely distributed. In WWII, he served in the French army and in the Communist Resistance. The Spanish Civil War affected the poet deeply (see his work Solidarité, 1938) and turned him toward political concerns and communist theory. They later wrote a Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme in 1938.Įluard disappeared for about seven months in 1924, was thought to be dead, but re-appeared with a story about traveling to Tahiti, Indonesia, and Ceylon, an undertaking later supposed to have been initiated by losing his wife Gala to the flamboyant Salvador Dali (to whom Eluard was later to write an Ode à Salvador Dali in 1938). During that time, he published his widely admired Capitale de la douleur (Capital of sorrow, 1926) and collaborated with André Breton on L'Immaculate conception (1930), a volume of prose poems about life as perceived by a fetus. His volume Les nécessités de la vie et la conséquence des reves (1921) presented surrealist principles that he embraced until 1938. Les animaux et leurs hommes, les hommes et leurs animaux ). He was so repulsed by his war experiences that he began expressing a kind of radical nihilism, a denial of all social mores, sometimes expressed through ironic humor (eg. At war's end, his noted volume of poetry, entitled Le devoir et l'inquiétude (1917), appeared and in 1919, his Poémes pour la paix (Poems for Peace). He was soon well enough to join the French army and fight in World War I, where he was severely injured by gas. When he was 16, he entered a Swiss sanatorium to be treated for tuberculosis. His first two volumes of poetry were the Premiers poémes (1913) and the Dialogues des inutiles (1914).
A founder of Surrealism and later, a militant communist, his works comment upon the two World Wars and the political and social ideals of the previous century.Įluard, born Eugène Grindel, was the son of a bookkeeper and dressmaker. Eluard was one of the important poets of the twentieth century.