ABSTRACT
Louis Aragon (1897–1982) wrote so many poems, novels, essays, and speeches, contributed to or edited so many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, participated in so many politico-literary gatherings all over Europe and in the Soviet Union, and belonged—from 1927 onwards—for so long to the French Communist Party (of which he was a Central Committee member from 1950 to his death), that it became increasingly difficult, even before World War II, to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine how good a poet the tonic surrealist of Le Mouvement perpétuel (Perpetual Motion, 1925) and Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant, 1926) remained.
