Popular Poetry and Mass-Observation

Abstract

Humphrey Jennings recognized the irreconcilability of Surrealism and leftist politics, and in his review of Herbert Read’s Surrealism (Contemporary Poetry and Prose 8 [December 1936]), he takes issue with the claim to “universal truths” that Read and Davies proffer. “The elevation of definite ‘universal truths’ of classicism is not only a short-sighted horror, but immediately corroborates really grave doubts already existent about the use of Surrealism in this country” (167). In essence, Jennings finds Read and Davies’s logic for Surrealism culpable for the same consensus-building ideology of political discourse and dismissively rejects their thesis. “Is it possible that in place of a classical-military-capitalist-ecclesiastical racket there has come into being a romantic-cultural-soi-disant cooperative-new uplift racket ready and delighted to use the ‘universal truths of romanticism—co-eval with the evolving consciousness of mankind’ as symbols and tools for its own ends?” (168). Jennings finds that they have missed the core use of Surrealism, which lies in the theory of “coincidences.” “‘Coincidences’ have the infinite freedom of appearing anywhere, anytime, to anyone: in broad daylight to those whom we most despise in places we have most loathed: not even to us at all” (168).