L’Honneur des poètes. Choix de poèmes de la Résistance française.

Poems by Pierre Jean Jouve, Jacques d’Aymé, Loys Masson, Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Wahl, Louis Aragon, Daniel Thérésin, Jacques Destaing and Paul Éluard: “Bientôt,” “La halte des heures” and “Liberté” (pp. 53–55), with the two words désir and souvenir in the 19th and 20th stanzas given in the singular, though under the title “Une seule pensée” in the journal Fontaine (where they appear in the plural).

It was this edition of L’Honneur des poètes — and not the collective publication directed in 1943 by Éluard for the Éditions de Minuit, of which he had no direct knowledge — that the Surrealist Benjamin Péret violently attacked in Le Déshonneur des poètes, drawn from an article of the same name written in Mexico City in February 1945, in which he railed against “a small pamphlet recently published in Rio de Janeiro: L’Honneur des poètes, which contains a selection of poems published clandestinely in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Not one of these ‘poems’ rises above the lyrical level of pharmaceutical advertising, and it is no accident that the vast majority of their authors felt compelled to return to classical rhyme and the alexandrine. Form and content necessarily remain closely linked, and in these ‘verses’ they interact in a headlong race toward the worst kind of reaction. It is indeed significant that most of these texts closely associate Christianity with nationalism, as if to demonstrate that religious dogma and nationalist dogma share a common origin and an identical social function.”