Poésie involontaire et Poésie intentionnelle
One of 1,500 numbered copies on vellum (no. 1248).
Presentation copy inscribed by Éluard to René Char: “Poètes qui s'ignorent et poètes qui s'oublient, à mon cher René [Char], très affectueusement, Paul Éluard.”
Éluard, who cites René Char twice in the collection (p. 57), repeats in this inscription the text of the publisher's wraparound band, which is preserved with the volume.
The text Éluard published with Seghers reproduces a lecture delivered before the war, on 21 February 1939, together with fragments read that same evening at the initiative of the Compagnie du Diable écarlate, directed by Sylvain Itkine, whose troupe had performed in occupied factories during the great strikes of June 1936.
The poet’s appearance at the Proscenium d’Europe of the Théâtre Pigalle had been heavily advertised in the press. On 25 May 1939, Excelsior reported on this “session of involuntary poetry and intentional poetry,” introduced by a lecture from Paul Éluard, in which, alongside poems by Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Laforgue and Raymond Roussel, one could hear Jules Jouy’s Vieux Paralytique, the Admirables Secrets du Grand Albert, the dream of an eleven-year-old child, a letter from the Portuguese nun, and Victor Litschfousse’s Impudiques.
Approached on the poet’s behalf by Louis Parrot in the second half of April 1942, Seghers immediately agreed, and Éluard promptly thanked him in a letter confirming how much importance he attached to this text, which “draws on the strongest part of what was once a shared will, a very high aspiration.” As soon as he received it from Parrot, Seghers wrote enthusiastically to Éluard on 22 May 1942: “I have read your text and the quotations with great joy, I am delighted, and I shall work toward its absolutely certain success. […] I leave for Lyon on Tuesday to bring the text to the printer. […] I am setting aside my last reams of paper for you.” Wishing his book to be “useful, fruitful,” the poet specified two days later to Parrot his “deep intention”: “to bring the poetic spirit in France, in areas hitherto poorly appreciated, toward a broader objectivity, toward its mother, ‘the life of all men.’” While extracts soon appeared in La Conquête du monde par l’image, published by La Main à plume, the project was enriched with new quotations; censorship troubles then delayed publication, which went to press only on 8 July 1942, later than the official completion date.
“However deep Paul Éluard’s commitment to political and national life may be,” Decaunes observes in his biography (pp. 202–203), “he does not thereby renounce what remains, in his eyes, the highest function of poetry: the discovery, the conquest, through language and across language, of all of humanity’s treasures […]. This is why the publication, in the midst of the Occupation, of Poésie involontaire, poésie intentionnelle is, from a certain point of view, an act at least as significant as that of the poems of Resistance.” It was in this same spirit that he had drawn closer to Noël Arnaud.
A significant Surrealist publication issued in the midst of the Occupation.