SOURCE: "The Leading Surreal Light," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 18, 1993, p. 5.

Merrill is an American poet and critic. In the following review, Merrill presents an overview of Breton's poetic achievement.

How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer—a fish—is at once inoffensive and to the point: Andre Breton and his friends wanted to reinvent man's relationship to life itself, and what better place to begin than with a simple mechanical operation? Illumination was their theme, humor their favorite means and the only problem with this joke, they might have said, is that it is not offensive. After all, these were the French poets and artists who greeted the advent of World War II with the publication of an anthology of black humor. "There's nothing more serious than a joke" goes the old saying, and the Surrealists turned...