Surrealist Poetry in France
by
J.
H. Matthews
Surrealism, because of the urgency and even brutality with which
it has asserted its claim to make poetry a vehicle for its own ideals
and because of its lack of concern for the ideals of the past, has had
an impact unequaled in our time by any other literary concept.
This book studies that impact. It shows what the surrealists
want to accomplish in poetry. why. and by what means. The first
such study in any language. it examines, with a wealth of illustra–
tions, the poetry of sixteen surrealist poets writing between the
1920's and the 1960's, among them Philippe Soupalt, Jean Arp,
and J.oyce Mansour. A number of the poems are published here for
the first time.
Professor Matthews, author or editor of five previous books on
surrealism, has provided in this study an analysis and survey of sur–
realism that no student of modern literature will want to be without.
$9.50
Wallace Stevens'
"Whole Harmonium"
by
Richard Allen Blessing
"Stevens, an artist trying to create an adequate symbol for the
truth in the twentieth century. found the world to be so without
structure, so dynamic, so much in process, that the fixed form of
any individual poem could not adequately represent those flowing
interchanges of imagination and phenomenal universe which con–
stitute the way of things for the modern man.
"In order to do critical justice to the poetry of Wallace
Stevens. we must read him with the awareness that the individual
poems are not his great achievement. that
The
Colleded Poems
of Wallace Stevens
is his unified "grand poem," for only that
large and complex work is capable of representing his view of the
flow of experience in a world in process."-from the Introduction.
This is the first study of Stevens to treat the whole body of his
work as a single, unified, grand poem, "The Whole of Har–
monium," as Stevens himself once preferred to call it. Viewed in
this way, each poem takes on a new context in relation to the
whole. A fascinating and unique study.
$7.50
From
your
bookseller or
Syracuse University Press
Syracuse, New York 13210
