SOURCE: Collier, Peter. “Surrealist City Narrative: Breton and Aragon.” In Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, edited by Edward Timms and David Kelley, pp. 214-29. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Collier discusses the urban settings in works by André Breton and Aragon.

In French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century urban motifs were easily recognisable as signs of street-corner realism (Baudelaire's cats, rats, bodies, jewels, mud, mobs, carriages, cafés, dogs, beggars) or of elevated symbolism (Mallarmé's drawing-room vases and fans). But the Surrealists' interest in the urban per se derives strictly from neither of these sources. Two aspects of city life were particularly likely to appeal to them: the presence in the city of a potentially revolutionary mass audience, exciting to poets who believed that they could change the real world—lying dismembered since the Great...