Exceptionnel recueil de onze poèmes autographes de Louis Aragon sélectionné par celui-ci pour paraître dans sa première anthologie

Exceptional collection of eleven autograph poems by Louis Aragon, written in the first half of 1945, with a handwritten table of contents by the author. This is a personal selection by Aragon for publication in his first and famous poetic anthology, part of the « Poètes d'Aujourd'hui » Collection (Aragon, published by Pierre Seghers in Paris, No. 2, July 20, 1945). This selection of manuscript poems was sent by the author to the publication director, Claude Roy, and enriched with a table of contents page listing the poems and the chronology of the collections for his friend's attention.
Our collection includes the manuscripts of « Fugue », « Pour demain », and « Casino des lumières crues » (from Feu de Joie, 1920), « Un air embaumé », « Persiennes », « Poème de cape et d'épée » (from Le Mouvement perpétuel, 1924), « Portrait », « Ancien combattant », « Litanies de [trois étoiles] » (from La Grande Gaîté, 1929), « Tant pis pour moi » (from Persécuté persécuteur, 1931), « Couplets du beau monde » (from Les Communistes ont raison, 1933), and « Magnitogorsk 1932 » as well as the « Ballade des vingt-sept suppliciés de Nadiejdinsk » (from Hourra l'Oural, 1934).
The manuscript poems are bound in half black morocco, with stylized paper boards, inner covers lined with black lambskin, and a case edged with the same morocco, the ensemble signed Leroux.

These manuscripts offer a unique panorama of fifteen years of writing marked by poetic and political insolence. Among these exceptional poems, we find « Fugue » and « Casino des lumières crues », from Feu de Joie, composed during his pre-surrealist youth:
« A joy bursts into three
Measured times of the lyre
A joy bursts in the woods
That I could not describe » (« Fugue »)
The oldest poems chosen by Aragon for the anthology also pay homage to the masters and friends of the young poet—such as Paul Valéry (« Pour demain », published in Feu de Joie), or Guillaume Apollinaire, to whom he dedicates « Un air embaumé » in Mouvement Perpétuel, inspired by the Calligrammes:
« On the tomb
A thousand regrets
Where lies in mercenary tufa
My sad Orpheus Apollinaire »
Reflecting the decisive influence of his friendship with André Breton, whom he met in 1917 at Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, the young Aragon's works already exhibit a joyful verbal deconstruction. The humorous poem « Casino des lumières crues » subtly announces the arrival of Dada in Paris:
« One evening on the trendy beaches, a tune is played
That makes the little horses go at a hellish pace »
This example of « literary cubism », imbued with preciousness and hermeticism, responds to Breton's poems that would form his first collection Mont de piété, and immerses us in the enthusiasm of the inseparable trio Aragon, Soupault, and Breton. Their collaboration took the form of the journal Littérature in 1919, soon renamed Révolution surréaliste to serve as a platform for their ideas of poetic renewal.
With the irruption in 1920 of Tristan Tzara and his Dadaist manifesto into the Parisian avant-garde scene, Aragon's writing opted for radicality, culminating in the famous « Persiennes ». The formidable repetition of « Persienne », typical of Dada's nihilism, constitutes, along with the other manuscripts from Mouvement Perpétuel, as many manifestos of the revolution occurring at the dawn of Surrealism. Adopting the term in the spring of 1924, Aragon, Breton, and Soupault turned a page in literary history, summarized in the ironic « Portrait » that the author makes in La Grande Gaîté published in 1929:
« Dreamt by the author of the Marche lorraine
Thought at dawn of the Bourgeois de Calais
Read the Jeune Parque for the aperitif ».
In the same collection, Aragon ironically summarizes the relative vacuity of the Dadaist experience with a comic poem titled Ancien Combattant:
« I did the Dada Movement
Said the Dadaist
I did the Dada Movement
And indeed
He had done it »
The end of the decade is also marked by his relationship with Nancy Cunard, an icon of the Roaring Twenties with erotic magnetism, who took him on travels across Europe from 1926 to 1928. She appears in the background in the « Litanies de *** » from La Grande Gaîté:
« She has the softest breasts in the world
Ah, the beautiful, beautiful leg
That it gives us »
In the early 1930s, unable to continue his wanderings with Nancy on his meager salary, Aragon was torn between his journalistic obligations, disapproved of by Breton, and his collective reflection sessions with the Surrealists.
The sterile debates following the Kharkov congress and Aragon's penchant for the novel genre, despised by the Surrealists, precipitated the movement's breakup. Aragon distanced himself from Breton and took refuge in writing poems of great violence, which formed his cursed collection Persécuté persécuteur, marking his definitive break with Surrealism. He would remember these poems after the Second World War and choose « Tant pis pour moi » for the present anthology. He became at that time the prophet of a bloody communist utopia:
 
 
« The firedamp will explode in Paris
With a long sound of shattered luxury
The children will watch the last brothel show
Shattered like a grenade »
and openly declares his allegiance to militant communism in his 1932 collection Les Communistes ont raison. His unwavering confidence in the Bolshevik regime earned him a visit the same year to the Soviet construction sites of the Caucasus as part of the « Brigade Gorki », a group of foreign writers devoted to the Stalinist cause. This trip to the USSR with Elsa Triolet inspired the writing of the collection Hourra l'Oural, from which he retains two admirable poems in his manuscript selection. The long epic « Magnitogorsk 1932 » celebrates the emergence of Soviet cities and the concert of machines of the new industrial era:
« The landscape is a giant chained in factory nails
The landscape has caught the hills in a net of barracks
The landscape has put on necklaces of smoke
The landscape has more scaffolding than a summer day has flies
The landscape is on its knees in socialism and electricity »
Aragon concludes his selection with the « Ballade des vingt-sept suppliciés de Nadiejdinsk », which resonates in 1945 as a tribute both to the communists who fell during the Russian revolution and under the Nazi regime:
« They were twenty-seven, very much alive
And their eyes were of light
Their hair, as before
Speaks of the sky with the wind »
This personal selection of works offered to posterity masterfully summarizes Louis Aragon's poetic and political journey, successively Dadaist, Surrealist, and then exalted communist.
The collection is among the very rare autograph poems by Louis Aragon still in private hands, as the author donated his personal and literary archives to the French nation in 1977.