ABSTRACT
This chapter explores to trace out some discussions and disagreements internal to surrealism to provide a backdrop against which surrealist poetic attitudes may be considered. Surrealism might be said to have been born from an uncomfortable encounter between poetry and war. Surrealist poetics can be summarized, as distinct from those of Paul Valery, in terms of these oppositions: it is natural and real, not artificial and fictive its harmony responds not to the consciously constructed symmetry that determines Western musical composition, but to the, often discordant, inner rhythms of human existence. In Valery's poetics, the Symbolist aesthetic is taken to its logical conclusion, in which classicism returns to frame the Romantic imagery, the surrealists sought the opposite path: to lay bare symbolism so that it's underlying disorder of the sensibility could be released. For Valery poetry satisfies a human need for greatness and sanctity although this very endeavour represents a vain attempt to encapsulate a perfect form.
