| Name: |
Benjamin Péret
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| Year of Birth & Death: |
(1899-1959)
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| Biography: |
Born in Rézé (Loire Atlantique France) died in Paris. He was one of the founders of the Surrealist movement in France and active in the movement from its formation until his death. He edited at one stage La Révolution surréaliste. He joined the Communist Party in 1925. Péret was one of the first of the Surrealists to break with Stalinism. In the early 1930s, living in Brazil (with his wife, the singer Elsie Houston) he joined the trotskyist Communist League (Left Opposition). He fought during the Spanish Civil War in the POUM ranks and with anarchists. Exiled in Mexico, he wrote Le Désohonneur des poètes, a strong pamphlet against the « Resistance poetry » and « poésie engagée ». He was an uncompromising believer in the revolutionary nature of poetry, his collections of stories : Main forte (1946) and Le Gigot, sa vie et son œuvre (1957), as well as the poems of Dormir, dormir dans les pierres (1927), Le Grand Jeu (1928), Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là (1936), with their mixture of the marvellous, the humorous, the sacrilegious, reveal the subversive inventiveness of his poetry.
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