Donne's comparisons of his love, for example, with medieval property laws arouse an increasing curiosity which arouse us even from the literary coma which we have been in since we were wheeled out of ninth-grade English. Warnke's edition has an excellent and rare selection of both the poetry and prose. His introduction gives a lot of historical detail, but mostly misses the point. T. S. Eliot gets it in three or four pages. Related Books Wolfram, Eddie, and Larkin, David, eds.
Most artists belong to both groups.
The intention seems to be to produce a heightened perceptual awareness of reality as a whole, and thus a heightened emotional awareness, by the juxtaposition of the superreal and the impossible. The practitioners tend to deep but sometimes subtle social criticism . Maybe yes, maybe no. In the introduction to this book, Eddie Wolfram points out that Magritte never felt himself bound by Surrealist dogma, and never enslaved himself totally to Freud in his explorations of human drives. Maybe those are two of the reasons that Magritte's work is more beautiful, and sometimes more cutting, than that of most of the surrealists.