Modern surrealism, starting with Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the word back in 1917, usually promises more than it delivers. If the promise, to quote André Breton's surrealist manifesto, is art and poetry full of “previously neglected forms of association,” brimming with magic, leaps beyond reason, and hallucinations, the delivery, more often than not, is either trite or incomprehensible. “Automatic writing,” another “method” favored by some surrealists, frequently combines perfectly trivial insights with failed grammar. These lapses are more apparent in surrealist poetry than in the painting, where the technical mastery of the artist— Max Ernst, say, or Duchamp or Dalí or Klee— plus sheer intelligence and wit, may manage to steer what could be merely puzzling away from the totally private, the brutally introverted, the adolescent. In surrealism, the danger always matches the invitation. On the one hand, a dull talent may produce art or poetry that is pure showbiz dazzle, and about as powerful in the end as the timid Wizard of Oz, a charming knave full of bemused self- pity. On the other, there are Bosch and Rimbaud to be considered, geniuses anticipating surrealism, who invented realms of color, energy and cleverness in which the subconscious plays with its torments and finds freedoms undreamed of in Horatio's philosophy, in which the miraculous “more” of things, their special mystery, appears in marvelous new ways.

Plainly too, as in any art that focuses exclusively on the “self,” an imagined self really, the attitudes of the surrealist artist, his attitudes toward himself, determine the range and value of the art. This is not the case with other sorts of artists, who may use the startling, bizarre paradoxes of surrealism as possibilities, while remaining committed to reason. Shakespeare's attitudes toward himself play no role in his writings. Dante's despair, at the beginning of the Inferno, is cushioned by faith in God and faith in poetry. Whitman's celebration of himself is really a celebration of everyone else. Emily Dickinson allows her absolute trust in the discipline of the quatrain form, in which she nearly always writes, to transmute her private griefs into the gold of a public vision, and her hopefulness into an idea of the sublime, reaching far beyond herself. Dylan Thomas, at his surrealistic best, loses himself entirely in his devotion to the magic of words and the English language.