SOURCE: Wayne, Eric. “Oranges and Language in Eluard and Apollinaire.” Romance Notes XIX, no. 3 (spring, 1979): 302-06.

In the following essay, Wayne discusses Eluard's most famous line of poetry: “The world is blue like an orange.”

Eluard's most famous line, “La terre est bleue comme une orange,” which begins the seventh poem of “Premièrement,” in L'amour la poésie (1929), is also among his most discussed: references to it are found throughout Eluard criticism, and it figures in a novel (Le Clézio's Le Procès-verbal) where the protagonist questions its divergence from verifiable physical reality. The latter's dilemma resembles slightly that of some Eluard critics, who have attempted to determine the meaning of such a comparison, and who have explained it in terms of a mingling of Mallarméan azur with the fertility and succulence suggested by an orange. At the same time, there exists the essentially trivial...