Famous poet /1897 - 1990

Philippe Soupault

Westwego

One summer I was walking around London
your feet are on fire and your heart is in your eyes
in front of black walls in front of red walls
at the big docks
where huge policemen like petulant ones
standing question mark
You could play with the sun
perched like a bird on everyone
monuments
train pigeon
everyday pigeon
I walked through this neighborhood called Whitechapel
pilgrimage of my youth
where I found nothing
as very well dressed people
who wore top hats
and matchstick sellers
with straw hats on
who cried like the peasant women of France
to attract the customers
penny penny penny
I entered a pub
third class wagon
Daisy Mary Poppy
there they sat around the table
next to the fishmongers
who chewed with a wink
to forget the night
the night that came with wolf steps
with owl steps
the night and the smell of the river and that of the tides
the dream-torn night

it was a sad day
made of copper and sand
who glided lazily between the memories

Analysis (ai): This poem situates the speaker in early 20th-century London, drawing on urban imagery and class contrasts common in modernist literature, but diverges by centering personal wandering over fragmented consciousness, aligning more with French surrealism’s early observational mode than high modernist abstraction.

Tone and Perspective: The tone remains detached yet emotionally charged, conveyed through bodily metaphors like “feet burning” and “heart in the eyes,” suggesting an internal restlessness projected onto the external cityscape, a technique more restrained than the author’s later automatic writings.

Urban Imagery and Symbolism: London’s docks, policemen, and alleyways are rendered with symbolic weight—policemen as “irritated question marks” introduce existential doubt into the social order, a motif absent in Soupault’s purely dream narratives but consistent with interwar European skepticism.

Socioeconomic Contrast: The juxtaposition of top-hatted gentlemen and straw-hatted match sellers echoes 19th-century social critique, yet the poem avoids sentimentality by framing disparity as mundane, integrated into the rhythm of “penny penny penny,” reflecting a surrealist interest in the uncanny within routine.

Temporal Structure: Time moves sluggishly—“a sad day of copper and sand” that “glides between memories”—rejecting linear progression, a formal choice common in post-WWI literature but here executed with a lyrical slowness unusual for Soupault, who typically favored abrupt shifts.

Intertextual Placement: Unlike the author’s more radical experiments like Les champs magnétiques, this poem retains narrative coherence, possibly indicating a transitional phase between Dada impulses and disciplined poetic form, closer in style to Breton’s early narratives than to later surrealist excess.

Auditory and Sensory Motifs: Sound dominates the final stanzas—whispering tides, the cry of vendors, the grinding of forgotten nights—creating a sensory overlayer that prefigures modernist soundscapes but lacks the phonetic innovation found in contemporaneous works by Eliot or Schwitters.

Engagement with Modernity: The poem engages industrial modernity through smell (“river stench”) and mechanized labor, focusing on bodily endurance rather than technological awe, a perspective shared with working-class narratives of the period but filtered through a bourgeois flâneur’s gaze.

Form and Language: Written in free verse with irregular stanzas, the poem uses repetition and metaphor without syntactic disruption, a notable restraint for a surrealist, suggesting influence from naturalist poetry or early documentary modes.

Less-Discussed Dimension: Often read as nostalgia for revolutionary youth, the poem equally critiques the commodification of experience—“playing with the sun,” the performative cries of vendors—implying that both memory and identity are subject to market rhythms, a theme underexplored in analyses of Soupault’s work.

Position in Author’s Oeuvre: Among the author’s lesser-known German-language pieces, this work stands out for its geographic and linguistic displacement, adopting an outsider’s gaze that contrasts with his more introspective French texts, possibly reflecting exile or travel during the 1920s avant-garde circuits.

Contemporary Relevance: Its depiction of urban alienation through sensory overload and labor repetition resonates with later critiques of late capitalism, though without the political directness of postwar European poetry, maintaining an ambivalence typical of interwar artistic hesitation.

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Philippe Soupault Follow

English translation German

tomato blossoms

Don't know where to go
Set
plumb
bedded
In advance
Board the wagons
Bring on the brooms
What is there! The colors of the small fish
Or the lousy automobiles
Or the practical safety pins
Or the tall cylinder hats
Or Mr. X.
Or the newspaper kiosks
You just have to know how to use them.

Analysis (ai): The poem reflects early 20th-century experimentalism, aligning with Dada and Surrealist disruptions of logic and syntax prevalent in post-WWI European writing.

Language and Form Written in German-inflected French syntax, it fractures standard grammar, using abrupt line breaks and lowercase letters to destabilize meaning, resembling Soupault’s automatic writing experiments with Breton.

Imagery and Disjunction Juxtaposes mundane objects—safety pins, fish, hats, kiosks—without hierarchy, rejecting symbolic depth in favor of associative spontaneity typical of surrealist catalogues.

Voice and Agency The speaker’s indecision (“Weiß nit wohin ich gehen soll”) suggests alienation, but irony undercuts existential weight, contrasting the serious tone of contemporaneous expressionist works.

Interlingual Play Mixes German and French phrases, prefiguring later modernist multilingual techniques; this code-blending disrupts national linguistic norms, positioning the poem as transnational avant-garde.

Everyday as Structure Rather than elevating the trivial, it treats all items—fish, cars, newspapers—as equally operational, implying a proto-conceptual view of culture where function replaces metaphor.

Relation to Author’s Oeuvre Less narratively driven than Soupault’s later prose, this fragment echoes his early radical phase, showcasing linguistic play absent in his more conventional postwar writings.

Obscurity and Significance Among his minor poems, it stands out for its refusal of lyrical closure and its emphasis on procedural thought over emotional expression.

Contrast with Era Norms While many contemporaries sought mythic or psychological unity, this poem embraces randomness, aligning more with Schwitters’ collages than with Rilkean introspection.

Modern Concerns Its anti-teleological structure anticipates contemporary interests in decentered subjectivity and the affectless observation of consumer objects.

Formal Experimentation The lack of punctuation and shifting registers destabilizes voice, using typographic flatness to resist interpretation, a technique later adopted in concrete poetry.

Function Over Meaning The closing line frames perception as usage (“man muß sich ihrer nur zu bedienen wissen”), suggesting knowledge resides in interaction, not contemplation—a pragmatic tilt unusual in surrealist work.

Absence of Nostalgia Unlike contemporaneous urban poems that mourn modernity, this one catalogs without judgment, treating modernity as a field of neutral affordances.

Minimal Gesture The instruction “Her mit den Besen” interrupts the list aggressively, injecting fleeting action into an otherwise static inventory, briefly politicizing maintenance labor.

Spatial Disorientation Directions (“Lotrecht,” “En avant”) imply movement but lead nowhere, mirroring modernist spatial confusion without resorting to metaphysical despair.

Irony of Utility The enumeration of useful objects (safety pins, newspapers) contrasts with the poem’s own refusal of utility, creating a self-undermining pragmatism.

Reception Gap Rarely anthologized, it reveals Soupault’s range beyond automatic writing clichés, emphasizing his interest in objectivity amid surrealism’s turn inward.

Less-Discussed Angle The poem may parody guidebook language or instructional texts, using bureaucratic tone to deflate poetic authority, a comic gesture often overlooked in analyses of surrealist seriousness.

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