ABSTRACT
The first Surrealist text was composed five years before the movement was officially created in 1924. Excited by the writings of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet, which he encountered first as a medical student and then as an assistant in psychiatric hospitals during the war, Andre Breton set out to create a new kind of poetry. Breton himself distinguished between Surrealist texts, which were wholly automatic, and Surrealist poems, in which automatic lines were either given a structure or integrated into a preexisting framework. So much has been written about women and Surrealism that it is practically impossible to do justice to the topic. Most people who are familiar with Surrealist poetry will readily confess that Paul Eluard is their favorite poet. Eluard excels in inserting syntactic twists and turns that quickly leave the reader confused. He also has a knack for employing prepositions in unorthodox ways.
