SOURCE: An introduction to Dada/Surrealism, No. 17, 1988, pp. 1-11.

This excerpt was taken from Balakian's introduction to an issue of Dada/Surrealism that was devoted entirely to Breton. Balakian offers an overview of Breton's major poems and his best-known poetic techniques.

Viewed in its totality, the work of André Breton falls into three categories: the theoretical and philosophical essays, his narrative prose, and his poetry. The last two facets of his writing substantiate his modernism, which the first category announces. In a somewhat gothically constructed eighteenth-century prose, the theoretical texts belie automatism; they are sometimes a rebuttal to hypothetical abuses, personal and impersonal, creating a one-sided debate, expressing personal passion, critical, existential, and political, in a tone eloquent and didactic. Unlike Mallarmé's theoretical prose, which consists primarily of an a posteriori ars poetica composed after his major poems were written, Breton's are a priori for the most...