Selected Poems

Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) is one of the greatest and most influential ?gures in modern French poetry. He founded the journal Nord-Sud with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, which drew together the ?rst Surrealists. Associated with painters such as Picasso, Gris and Braque, he has been called a Cubist poet, for conventional structure is eliminated in his poesie brut ('raw poetry'), much as the painters cut away surface appearance to bring through the underlying forms. But Reverdy went beyond Cubist desolation to express a profound spiritual doubt and his sense of a mystery in the universe forever beyond his understanding. Andre Breton hailed him in the ?rst Surrealist Manifesto as 'the greatest poet of the time'. Louis Aragon said that for Breton, Soupault, Eluard and himself, Reverdy was 'our immediate elder, the exemplary poet'.