SOURCE: Nugent, Robert. “Reality of Experience: The Theory of Love.” In Paul Eluard, pp. 50-69. New York: Twayne, 1974.

In the following essay, Nugent discusses Eluard's love poetry in terms of the surrealist aesthetic.

I the Experience of Love

Eluard is perhaps best known as a love poet. Love, as a central theme of Eluard's poetry, becomes especially evident around 1923; yet, throughout his poetic career Eluard wrote poems about the experiences one has in being with another person, loving that person, and being without that person. He further expanded his individual involvement to involvement with humanity, the experiences one has in being with people, wanting to do something for others so that happiness and fulfillment might result. More profoundly, this experience is a way of acknowledging his own solitude and deepening his own poetic awareness. It is as a love poet, then, that he reaches the most precise appreciation...