Exquisite Corpse

Abstract

AbstractThis article makes the case for a sustained and growing interest in surrealism on the American poetry scene from the 1920s to the early 1960s, chiefly through a focus on the little magazines involved in adapting and publicizing surrealist work and ideals. Although surrealism's influence on American poetry from the 1960s forward has been widely recognized, its early history and influence in the United States have been just as widely overlooked, despite Dickran Tashjian's foundational work on this topic. For instance, the poet Dana Gioia comments that “one of the provocative ironies of twentieth-century literature is that during the Thirties and Forties when surrealism was transforming the landscape of European and Latin American poetry, it never took root in the United States.” It is shown that surrealism profoundly transformed the landscape of American poetry in the 1930s and 1940s, and that these surrealist roots gave vital shape and direction to the subsequent history of American poetry.