“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
What Freud did for dreams, André Breton (1896–1966) does for despair: in its distortions he finds the marvelous, and through the marvelous the redemptive force of imagination. Originally published in 1932 in France, Les Vases communicants is an effort
Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy histor
Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned “father of the Symbolists.” Mallarmé’s major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue “Hériodiade
The Selected Poems of Rene Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet s wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and
Capital of Pain, is considered one of the key texts of surrealism. This is the first new translation into English of this work in over 30 years and the only edition available in the English language. This edition presents the text in its entirety in a bil
This major anthology of writings by legendary poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) is the only English language source for a complete version of Tzara's epic Approximate Man now widely regarded as the poetic masterpiece of Surrealism. Included is a critical int
Joseph Cornell is a legendary yet living presence in American art. His famous boxes, with their ineffably perfect choice of elements -- the stuffed birds, the buttons and toys, the fragments of old theatrical posters, the poignant allusions to the worlds
Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers
Considered radical at the time, today Breton's ideas seem almost prescient, yet breathtaking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit. Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gas