Premières vues anciennes
Paris, Tiré à part de Minotaure no. 10, 1937.
1 vol. (245 x 320 mm) of 8 p., numbered 49 to 55, on tinted vellum paper, printed cover with vignette.
Rare offprint, printed in a small number.
This short anthology is a mosaic of maxims and aphorisms gathered here and there from the texts of those Éluard considered his precursors — Lewis Carroll, Laforgue, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Freud — interspersed with his own commentary: “If Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud seem full of remorse, it is because their solitude is limitless (…) For more than a hundred years, poets have come down from the summits where they believed themselves to stand. Now they are men among men; now they are brothers.” This declaration, made on the occasion of the Exposition internationale du surréalisme, would be reworked by Éluard the following year and given a definitive form in Donner à voir, published in 1939.
Provenance: Bibliothèque José Corti.
#28542
Back