SOURCE: “Péret;—Plausible Surrealist,” in Yale French Studies, No. 31, 1964, pp. 105–11.

In the following essay, Caws assesses Péret's poetry in terms of his consistent adherence to the theories of Surrealism, focusing on elements of repetition, humor, and playfulness.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues thinks it improbable that Péret will be widely read, while at the same time he maintains: “No one else can now or in the future presume to represent fully and purely Surrealist poetry” (Nouvelle Revue Française, Feb. 1959, p. 552). Péret is the most faithful poet of Surrealism because he is never untrue to its theory; he is the only one constantly at ease in automatic writing—though how automatic the writing is is not my concern in this article. It is said that he sat for hours in noisy cafés scribbling page after page which he corrected little, if at all. In...