Garrett Caples, "Surrealism Is a Romantic Critique of the Avant-Garde from Within":
The assertion that surrealism “eschews the traditional criteria…by which one judges a piece of writing” is certainly a strawman argument in 2014, inasmuch as the proposed criteria (“taste, beauty, structure, depth, symbolism”) haven’t been live considerations in any poetry worth taking seriously since modernism. That battle has been fought and won and no serious reader judges any contemporary poetry on these bases. The fact of the matter is that you must “assess the quality and value of surrealist writing in comparison to other writing,” for the simple reason that surrealism must exceed the quality and value of other writing. Despite one of surrealism’s earliest assertions, drawn from one of the movement’s key progenitors Lautréamont, that “Poetry should be made by all,” no “body of commitments” by itself is going to make you into a poet. If you would be a poet of any sort, it behooves you to know as much about poetry as you can.
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