Artaud and the surrealists

http://jacket2.org/commentary/artaud-and-surrealists

From the latest post at Jacket2:

“Even further, Artaud sets Marxism against poetry. He declares: “I call poetry today the understanding of this internal and dynamic destiny of thought.”[11] He goes on to say that “poetic understanding is internal, poetic quality is internal. There is a movement today to identify the poetry of the poets with that internal magic force which provides a path for life and makes it possible to act upon life.”[12] For the Surrealists poetry was synonymous with Surrealism, which is why in the beginning of his essay, Artaud makes a point to differentiate Surrealism’s beginnings from where it eventually headed. He describes “that hunger for a pure life which Surrealism was in the beginning” and maintains that this initial impulse “had nothing to do with the fragmentary life of Marxism.”[13]”