The sublime poet and the fascinating painter: Paul Eluard- Marc Chagall. In their mutual communication. Drawings and poems.

"Le dur désir de durer", 1946, Paul Eluard poesia 1946-1951- Latest love poems.

The poet writes: << Writing these verses I knew that they would be illustrated with drawings by Marc Chagall >>. Some poetry verses "To Marc Chagall": "Ane ou vache coq ou cheval Jusqu'a la peau d'un violon /Homme chanteur un seul oiseau/Danseur agile avec sa femme....

Eluard's writings faithfully reflect one of the safest Eluardian constants: the sentimental constant. Although many poems were not written pre, but on the occasion of the death of a woman and in the memory of her, the sentimental fact always remains underlying, indispensable. "... Those who rarely say hate, often say love ..."

The in fact, <<love>> of Eluard is never an identified love, even though it almost always takes on the appearance of love for a woman: it is love for women, love for all women; a love that <<deborde>>, to use a term eluardiano,it goes beyond the precise margins, until it becomes less and less specific, towards wider ideals.

It is a universal, fraternal love that ultimately embraces and involves every human and poetic fact, not without perplexity. In the poem "Dit de la force de l'amour" some verses say: << In this desert that lived and dressed me / She kissed me and kissed me / ordered me to see and hear. With kisses and words / His mouth followed the path of his eyes / There were some living of the dead and the living.

Eluard knows via Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Tzara, who are the men of surrealism, of Dada, who will then be joined by Desnos, Arp, Max Ernst etc. The shock of Dadaism was felt as early as 1916 (the February 8 is the date passed to history as that of the birth certificate of Dada). It was a "revolution" that appealed to a young, new spirit that reacted to the horror of blood by expressing itself in the desire to live and let live and in terms of poetry, all this expressed itself in total liberation of the form and language of the artist who could draw on everything, in the name of his human thought and his individuality.

Eluard couldn't help feeling sympathetic to these ideas. But Eluard does not exhaust his poetic research in the field of surrealism. His words always apply:<< Il ne faut pas de tout pour faire un monde il faut / Du bonheur et rien d'autre >>.

The momentum towards happiness, the charge of love for his fellows, ready to erupt in every direction and in every form, is always latent. On November 18, 1952, he died in Charenton, near Paris. One of the many funeral eulogies that French critics will dedicate to him says: << In modern times there is no greater poet than Paul Eluard: because no one, better than him, was able to show how poetry reaches its total greatness in helping men to transform the world >>