Paul Éluard, Biography Of A Wonderful Poet
Paul Éluard is considered the greatest of the Surrealist poets. His defined literary personality, the expressive force that characterizes him and the lyricism of his poems made him one of the great universal poets. He wrote to love with the same passion that he wrote to freedom and against war.
All sorts of honorary titles have been informally given to him. “Master of surrealist poetry “, “The most classic of modern poets”, “The poet of freedom” or “The greatest poet of love”, among others. It seems that all the qualifiers fall short before the talent of this wonderful poet.
Like other greats of literature, the secret of his poetry is in the emotional and intellectual honesty with which they were written. His verses have that subtle, but deep mark of the genuine. His life also had contradictory and difficult episodes, which he dealt with with creativity and intelligence. His existence was also, in a way, a poem.
Paul Éluard, a sick boy
Paul Éluard was born in Saint Denis (France), an area that had a clear proletarian atmosphere. It happened on December 14, 1885. His real name was Eugene Grindel. When he was just 12 years old, he arrived in Paris and began his studies at the famous Colbert Lyceum. However, he contracted tuberculosis and this forced him to leave the high school and spend a long time in a sanatorium in Switzerland. His first poems date from there.
His first work, Poems , dates from 1911. During his time at the sanatorium, he passionately read those who became his literary references: Whitman , Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Hölderin and Lautréamont. After that hard ordeal, Paul Éluard was drafted to the front lines in the First World War in 1915.
Paul Éluard was one of those poets who did not need a placid environment to let his verses come out. In the middle of the trench he composed two of his most famous works: Duty and Restlessness and Another’s Laughter. At the end of 1917, he was the victim of a severe gas attack and this produced gangrene in the bronchi. That got him out of the confrontation and sent him back to a sanatorium in Paris.
Gala, a passing muse
During his first stay in the sanatorium, Paul Éluard had met another patient with tuberculosis who had stolen his heart. It was a Russian girl whose name was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, but who went down in history with the pseudonym with which she was later known to all: Gala. The war separated them, but then they met again in Paris in 1917 and married.
Gala’s greatest quality was not fidelity. This became clear soon enough. When she met the German painter Max Ernst, she fell in love with him. It is not known whether Paul Éluard did not oppose this relationship because of a great breadth of mind or a desperate love. In fact, the three of them ended up living together on the outskirts of Paris.
Later, during a vacation, Gala met the one who was to become the great love of her life: Salvador Dalí. This ended the marriage to Paul Éluard in 1929 and plunged Éluard into a great depression. After this episode the poet set out to go around the world, like a wandering traveler. It also gave rise to some of his most beautiful poems.
A resilient man
Paul Éluard later married, twice. The first, with a woman he called “Nusch” and who was a model for Pablo Picasso. The marriage was consolidated in 1934, but she died in 1951. She then married Dominique, her last love, a year before her own death.
Meanwhile, Paul Éluard had become the poet of freedom. Although his thing was not to make a militant literature in the strict sense, he did feel called to express in his verses a demand for freedom and justice, and against war. During the Second World War he collaborated with the French resistance and had to go underground.
His anti-war poems are masterpieces, as are his love poems. The most outstanding thing about this wonderful poet, according to the experts, was his ability to express with deep balance and beauty the contradiction of feelings. He went down in history as one of the great masters of French lyric.
