Question

Read the excerpt below from the poem "Freedom of Love" by Andre Breton and answer the question that follows. My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth . . . My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child’s writing With brows of the edge of a swallow’s nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne Source: Breton, Andre. "Freedom of Love." 99 Poems in Translation. Ed. Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, and Geoffrey Godbert. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Google Books. Web. 13 May 2011. Compare Breton’s portrayal of his wife in this poem to how Spenser and Shakespeare portray their loves in their sonnets. What cultural and generational differences do you notice?

Answer 1

Breton's portrayal of his wife can be read as an example of surrealist poetry.

Step-by-step explanation:

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) were both English poets representative of a period called the English Renaissance. As a general rule, in their love poetry, they both represent lovers or spouses with rather classical images or motifs (such as comparing a woman's cheeks to flowers or fruits, praising the whiteness of the skin, or comparing the beloved to mythical creatures or regal characters). For example, in "A Ditty", Spenser writes of his wife, Eliza, whom he deems "the Queen of the Shepherds":

"The Redde rose medled with the White yfere,

In either cheeke depeincten lively chere..."

While Shakespeare himself, in his famous Sonnet 130, deploys some of the classical motifs only to subvert them in his portayal of a woman whose looks are unconventional (for Elizabethan poetry's standards):

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks..."

André Breton (1896-1966), on the other hand, was a French poet and the main representative of Surrealism, a literary and cultural movement intended to innovate in the arts by abandoning rationalism and turning instead to the logic of dreams and to the absurd. For this reason, the images in Breton's poem are very strange and striking--"My wife, with the hair of a wood fire"--, even nonsensical--"My wife with shoulders of champagne"--or inexplicable ("My wife with the lips of a cockade"). The name of the poem, "Freedom of Love", probably hints at the aforementioned notion of freeing the subject of art (or poetry, in this case) from received notions and clichéd associations.

In short, while the contrast in the portrayal of a beloved person between these three poets are definitely related to cultural and generational differences, they are more accurately described as a product of the poets' affiliation with different literary movements and eras: Elizabethan poetry, for Spenser and Shakespeare, and Surrealism, for Breton.