On the Lower Slopes, Preface

It is the misfortune of poetry that those who take it seriously never take it quite seriously. They agree, no doubt, that you have to be crazy for a moment. But they do not accept being mad themselves for long enough to then become quietly wise.
Scientists admit such bizarre events as the variation of shapes (for example). Then they patiently search for how the horse's feet must have changed, or the carp's eyes. But the critics, when they once suspected that it is given to poets to read the future, are delighted with their audacity. Leave it there. Vaguely waiting for the poets to be grateful for the gift.
But it is here that everything should begin on the contrary, and the poems are ungrateful: they are quite right.

Those who grouped Dada from 1920, later surrealism, did not have a common idea; not an intention. Their doctrine was vague (but they happily ignored their doctrine). Their science of the world was not new (but they took no account of their science of the world). Yet their conduct was obvious, their decisions simple. Obviously, they knew what to expect.
So much despair the day after a victory, so much forgetfulness but so much ardor, so many taboos, orders and watchwords, even the methodical organization of the Companions-du-Disaster, leaves no doubt. What they saw, everyone saw twenty years later.

Paul Éluard has retained the dazzling patience that we know him to have. A ruinous enterprise, which eats away everything that was poetry around poetry, loses its terrors with him, since he fears neither the story and the fable, nor the enigma and the proverb, nor the gray part and the golden verse. Nor, I will say, even eloquence.

We could judge him to be cutesy: that's because he experiences subtle influences. Grandiloquent: he tolerates colossal misfortunes. Uncertain: it is because he trembles to see to what extent the view that everyone, you or I, has the right to take of the world, has become impossible for us. But he is patient enough to give him his chances. He was never too defeated.

Natural as confidence, he undoubtedly deserved to keep the gift. I cannot read it without believing it.

*

[In Jean Paulhan O.C. IV, p. 273-274, the same text is repeated, dated 1942-1950, with an additional paragraph]:

As soon as he opens his eyes, the light seems new. What well-spoken words, what fresh lips! Even a dazzling patience does not despair of transforming the riddle, the proverb, and even the golden verses:

The heart is what she sings
She melts the snow
The birds’ nurse.

I do not know, no one will ever know, if the poet carried out, in his maturity, the secret operation which led him towards this point of consciousness where reflection, nor even intuition, can reach. So, I enter this curious limitless domain where no writer has yet entered. Éluard's poetry is, like the night, without rival.

*

[Jean Paulhan, preface to On the lower slopes, booklet composed of seven poems written by Éluard in the winter of 1940-1941, and published in April 1941 by La Peau de Chagrin. Reprinted in Éluard, OC I, p.1059-1060]
(Appendix V of the Correspondence P. Éluard & J. Paulhan, p. 198, Éditions Claire Paulhan).