Why has surrealism been such a success in painting and such a failure in poetry? Why do some of the most striking lines in twentieth-century poetry—Antonin Artaud’s “the sky flows into the nostrils/ like a nutritious blue milk”—go forgotten and unread, if they were ever remembered in the first place? One of the twentieth century’s most recognizable images is Salvador Dalí ’s The Persistence of Memory. But if asked to name a single surrealist poem or line of surrealist poetry, most people, critics included, would be stumped.

These were some of the questions that came to mind as I was reading Willard Bohn’s recent anthology, Surrealist Poetry.¹ The volume is a bilingual collection of mostly French and Spanish surrealist poetry translated into English. All the big names are here—Louis Aragon, André Breton, René Char, Paul Eluard, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz—as well as a good selection of minor figures like José María Hinojosa and Braulio Arenas.

If asked to name a single surrealist poem, most people would be stumped.

Surrealism has had an “unprecedented global impact,” Bohn writes in the introduction, and he’s right about that impact being global, even if it hasn’t exactly been unprecedented. It is, without a doubt, the twentieth century’s most popular art movement. Unlike cubism or abstract expressionism, it spans many media—paint, stone, poetry, and film—and, as a technique for creating images, it has persisted for nearly a hundred years in the work of