Surrealism
Quick answer: Surrealism set poetry loose in the dream world: automatic writing, strange juxtaposition and marvellous images. Its history, poets and practical uses.
Surrealism is the movement, founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton, that sought to release the unconscious mind into art through dream imagery, automatic writing and the collision of things that reason keeps apart. Breton's first manifesto defined it as pure psychic automatism: thought expressed without the control of reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral concern.
Poets keep returning to Surrealism because it solves a practical problem: how to say what daylight logic cannot. Its influence runs through Lorca's Poet in New York, through the deep image poets of 1960s America, and into the strange, luminous non sequiturs of contemporary prize lists. Every startling juxtaposition in a modern poem owes it a small debt.
History and Key Figures
Surrealism grew out of Dada's wartime revolt, but where Dada wanted destruction, Breton wanted discovery. He and Philippe Soupault wrote The Magnetic Fields (1920) by automatic writing, and after the 1924 manifesto the Paris group gathered Paul Éluard, whose love poems make the method tender, Robert Desnos, famous for composing in trance states, and Louis Aragon.
Freud stood behind the whole project: dreams were treated as dispatches from the truest part of the mind. The movement spread through Spanish (Lorca, Alberti), Greek, Latin American and eventually English-language poetry, and its visual wing, Dalí and Magritte, made its images world-famous.
How the Surrealist Image Works
The theory came from Pierre Reverdy, whom Breton quoted approvingly: an image is strong when it joins two realities that are genuinely distant, and the spark jumps the gap. 'The moon like a coin' is weak because the gap is small. Something like this invented line is closer to the method: 'My mother's sewing machine stitched the thunder shut.' Distant realities, one spark, and a feeling arrives that paraphrase cannot touch.
Automatic writing is the delivery system: write faster than your censor can edit, then harvest the images worth keeping.
Using Surrealism Without Writing Nonsense
The common failure is randomness, images so unrelated that no spark jumps. Working surrealists revise hard: they generate wildly, then select the images that feel inevitable once seen. Keep one foot in the real world; a poem grounded in a kitchen or a bus stop can afford far stranger weather than one floating free. Judges notice the difference too: in Writory's monthly contest the creativity score rewards the strange image that lands, not strangeness for its own sake.
What poets can take from this
- Write for ten minutes without stopping or correcting, then mine the pages for two usable images.
- Test each strange image: distant enough to spark, connected enough to land.
- Ground the poem in one ordinary, named place so the strangeness has somewhere to happen.
- Keep a dream notebook by the bed; first-minute recall is the freshest source material.
- Revise surreal drafts ruthlessly; the method is wild generation followed by cold selection.
Try it yourself
Record a dream, or borrow a household object and a weather event that have nothing in common. Write a poem in which the object controls the weather, and keep every other detail strictly realistic.
Questions
What is the difference between Surrealism and Dadaism?
Dada came first, in 1916, and was a revolt against a civilisation at war: anti-art, chance, provocation. Surrealism, founded 1924, redirected that energy toward exploring the unconscious. Dada wanted to demolish meaning; Surrealism went looking for a deeper one.
Does surrealist poetry have to come from automatic writing?
No. Automatic writing was Breton's founding technique, but most poets use it as a generator rather than a finished method. The surrealist quality lives in the image logic, not in how unedited the draft is.
Is surrealism still used in poetry today?
Constantly. Poets such as James Tate and Charles Simic built careers on domesticated surrealism, and the startling juxtaposition remains one of the most common effects in contemporary poems and contest winners.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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