SOURCE: York, R.A. “Eluard's Female Landscape.” Orbis Litterarum 35, no. 1 (1980): 59-73.

In the following essay, York examines the recurring image of “woman as landscape” throughout Eluard's oeuvre.

This paper seeks to place the image of woman as landscape, frequent in Eluard, in the structure of the poems in which it appears. The image most often indicates a transition within the poem from a state of personal identity to one of impersonality; but this basic structure is subject to systematic modifications affecting the character of the image and of the states preceding and succeeding it; thus poems may imply a range of different values and may present the relationship of speaker and other people or outside world more or less positively. Forms of the image may also occur initially, so that the remainder of the text shows either a gradual development of the impersonal state they imply or the...