Paul Eluard (1895–1952)

Paul Éluard was the pseudonym of Eugène Grindel, born in Saint-Denis, France. His parents were Jeanne-Marie (Cousin), a seamstress, and Clément Eugène Grindel, a real estate agent. The family moved to Paris when he was a child. Éluard began writing poetry as a teenager, while convalescing from tuberculosis at a Swiss sanatorium. There he met a young Russian his age in exile, Helene Dmitrievna Diakanova, whom he nicknamed Gala. Together they read symbolist and avant-garde poets such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire, as well as Russian authors such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Éluard was drafted into the French army during World War I, serving as an infantry soldier and as a medic. He was traumatized by his experiences, which were the basis of his Poèmes pour la Paix (Little Poems for Peace), published under the name Paul Éluard in 1918. He married Gala, his muse, with whom he had a daughter. Éluard joined the Dada movement, and was intimately involved in the birth of Surrealism with his close friends André Breton, Max Ernst, and other artists also marked by the war. Éluard's work from this time is known for its emphasis on linguistic and semantic dislocation. His important Surrealist works included Capitale de la douleur (1926), La Rose publique (1934) and Les Yeux fertiles (1936). Éluard and Gala divorced in 1930, and she later married Salvador Dali. In 1934, he married Maria Benz, a music hall artist known as Nusch, who inspired some of his most beautiful poetry. Éluard was galvanized by the rise of fascism and Nazism to travel Europe denouncing these movements. At the outbreak of World War II, he re-joined the Communist Party and wrote and published for the French Resistance. He was the author of the first collection of poetry published in Occupied France, Le Livre ouvert (1940, 1942). The British Royal Air Force dropped copies of his poem "Liberté" over Nazi-Occupied Europe; it was set to music by Francis Poulenc in 1944. Other poems were broadcast clandestinely on pro-Allies radio stations. Éluard lived in hiding and moved frequently to avoid arrest; in 1943, he took refuge in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban. In June 1944, the first issues of L'eternelle revue, an underground magazine created by Éluard with Jean Lescure and Louis Parrot, were published in Lucien Scheler's bookshop in Paris. After the war, Éluard traveled to numerous cultural events and peace conferences around Europe. Nusch died in 1946, and he married again to Dominique Laure in 1951, the year he published his last book, a collection of poems entitled Le Phénix (The Phoenix).