Paul Eluard is the most widely recognized poet of Surrealism, a revolutionary artistic movement which has played a major rôle in the development of twentieth-century French thought and vision. Although André Breton (1896–1966) was chief spokesman of the Surrealists, Eluard too was an eloquent broadcaster of their ideals. Reacting partly to the crisis of the First World War in which he was involved, he calls for man's total liberation from the shackles of a system of values which could produce and allow the massacre in the trenches. The key to this new world (already apprehended by Rimbaud, with his hatred of a sterile hide-bound moral society, his recreative thirst, and his cry that ‘l'amour est à réinventer’) lies in freeing man's imaginative vision, in promoting his capacity to dream to the level of a principle for living. Breaking through the sallow, emaciated mask of the goddess Reason, Surrealism seeks to reveal the more colourful and fertile processes of thought which lie underneath; hence its interest in dreams and the subconscious – not just as a source of highly imaged poetry, but as a means of allowing latent ideals to surge into reality with the utmost spontaneity, of kindling life to an awareness of its capacity for joy and luminosity, of reconciling man with the deeper potentialities of his ‘other self’ and of saving him from his fate as a divided being, a source of conflict.