[Bogan was an American lyric poet whose darkly romantic verse is characterized by her use of traditional structures, concise language, and vivid description. Bogan was also a distinguished critic known for her exacting standards and her penetrating analysis of many of the major poets of the twentieth century. In the following review, she accuses Breton's poetry of exhibiting the "student childishness" she finds typical of surrealism.]

It is extraordinary how vital and adult the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, who passed with the speed of a comet through the French literary world between his sixteenth and his nineteenth year (1870-73), now appears. Beside it, the poetry of the Surrealist André Breton, one of his successors, who was born in 1896 and has worked all his life as a literary experimenter, seems much more the work of an adolescent. This season [November 1946], we are able closely to compare the works of the young innovator and of this successor. View Editions has published a volume of André Breton's poetry, Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares, translated by Edouard Roditi (with drawings by Arshile Gorky and a cover designed by Marcel Duchamp), at the same time that New Directions has published a new translation, by Louise Varèse, of the prose poems from Rimbaud's Illuminations. The comparison brings out the truth that there are no short cuts to the world of the imagination. Rimbaud, in spite of occasional big talk about control over his subconscious processes, knew that he was only an instrument for them. ("It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.") Breton has consciously applied every known method to get at "le merveilleux," of which the subconscious seems to have the secret. But, at fifty, he seems undeveloped beside the wild youth who pushed into maturity in a flash, after attempting to live his life in accordance with his compelling and terrible vision. (The Surrealists, by the way, rejected Rimbaud long ago as being vulgar.)

Breton entered the Surrealist movement from French Dadaism. He has been its leader almost continuously, in spite of, or because of, his high-handed manner of leadership. The changes through which Surrealism has passed have Breton's intransigent nature behind them. Breton has, in fact, committed repeatedly what, according to early Surrealist doctrine, is one of the chief literary sins: he has taken himself too seriously. If the movement has now reached a blind alley, it is largely Breton's doing. He has multiplied his effects, rather than developed his gifts, and thus, after years of issuing manifestoes, diatribes, defenses, counter-defenses, of excommunicating disciples with the severity of a pontiff and inventing tactics with the ingenuity of a field marshal, he is beginning to assume the tone and features not of a master but of a rather bullying boy.

It is interesting to conjecture just why Surrealism, with its high aims—to change modern sensibility, to plumb the subconscious, to release the writer from isolation and a sense of futility and despair—has ended in smallness and dullness, without having "transformed the world" or "changed human life," as its adherents once planned. (Surrealist painting has been more successful in projecting various subliminal emotions.) It has thus always had the air of a turbulent schoolroom. The actual literary forms adopted by its members have often resembled caricatures of schoolroom tasks. There are poems made up of questions and answers, in the form of adages, proverbs, and definitions, of lists and catalogues—all close to the manner and matter of the examination paper. Or they have resembled the catechism and litanies familiar to those with a religious upbringing. Surrealists have played parlor paper games, like intelligent children; they have produced automatic writing and hypnotized each other; they have told each other their dreams, drawn up lists of literary ancestors and favorite writers. They have written insulting letters to the Pope, to eminent men of letters, and to their friends. The long squabbles, hairsplittings, and choosing of sides; the continual demotion of leaders and excommunication of followers; the practical jokes, the indiscriminate hatred of "culture," and the extreme sentimentality (on the whole) of their love poetry—all these preoccupations point to an emotional and intellectual fixation at a pre-adult level. Breton's… volume, which includes poems written from 1923 through 1944, preserves a good deal of this student childishness intact. He is a fine and eloquent rhetorician, but he is tiresome nonetheless. His subconscious, at least, seems never to have grown up.