The Publication Context of the Twenty-Five Poems

The Zurich Context

This poetic collection is the first to have been published in Zurich, in 1918, with illustrations by Arp, and the third work in the dada collection, after The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Antipyrine and the Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) by Richard Huelsenbeck. A reissue took place in Paris at the Revue Fontaine editions with 12 drawings by Arp, different from the engravings of the first edition, in 1946 under the title Twenty-Five and One Poems, with an unpublished poem, "Salt and Wine."

At first glance these poems are obscure, one doesn't know how to enter them. Vowels and words wander freely, the enunciation is indeterminate, sentences are generally asyntactic, images enigmatic, meaning disjointed. An impression of chaos emerges. One can take the side of what Tzara, in a letter to Breton (March 1919), calls immediacy, and let oneself be carried away in this universe of heterogeneous elements. Or else, as obscurity incites exegesis, attempt more scientific approaches, as Mary Ann Caws or Marguerite Bonnet have done. I chose to enter through dates: 1916-1918. And to take the expression "intertext of the world" (H. Béhar) at face value as "European world" in a Europe at war.

Unlike De nos oiseaux, which includes poems written from 1912 to 1922, thus a broad palette of poetic production, the poems in this collection were all written between 1916 and 1918 (except for "Froid jaune" which dates from 1915). The Twenty-Five Poems therefore represent a condensation of Tzara's concerns during this period, the culmination of which is the Dada Manifesto 1918, read on July 23, 1918 in Zurich and published in Dada 3 in December, very shortly after the publication of the Twenty-Five Poems in June. The two years 1916-1918 are those of tension between the various influences from the currents of modernity from which Tzara gradually emancipates himself to produce dada novelties. The Twenty-Five Poems therefore constitute both a resonance chamber of European modernity, which is one of its basic materials, and a reflection of the gestation of Dada, of which they are the poetic laboratory.

We know well that Tzara proclaimed, from the Dada Manifesto 1918: "Dada is not modern," ceaselessly repeating this formula which would be at the origin of his quarrel with Breton, and claiming Dada as rupture and refusal of any compromise with schools and theories, before nuancing the discourse under the influence of Hegelian-Marxism of the 1930s, notably in the Essay on the Situation of Poetry. The influences are nevertheless readable in the Twenty-Five Poems. The explanation is historical and lies in the intellectual atmosphere of Europe where a certain number of protagonists converge toward Zurich under the influence of war. A veritable precipitate of the "cultural koinè proper to European intellectual life at the beginning of the 20th century" then occurs1. The fund from which Tzara draws to realize his exercise of "haute couture," this "intertext of the world," is composed of "Esprit nouveau," simultaneism, cubism, abstraction, futurism, expressionism. The Twenty-Five Poems are at once a fabric of languages (Romanian, Middle French, African languages), a crossing of diverse influences and an explosion of enunciations, discourses, and images.

I will try to show how the great experiments undertaken by Tzara in 1916-1918, readable in echo in this collection, subvert the simple play of influences.

The Publication Context: Tzara, Italian Futurist Reviews and French "Cubo-Futurist" Reviews

Fourteen of the Twenty-Five and One Poems, that is the majority, were first published in France and Italy, in both countries for "Retraite." Nine were published in various Italian futurist reviews in 1917, and reprinted in collection with variants2. Six others were published in France, in 1917 and 1918, in Sic and/or Nord-Sud3, reviews with strong futurist and cubist connotations4. Among the twelve others, three were published in Dada 1 and in Dada 2 in 19175, five only appear in reviews between 1919 and 19286 and four were not published in reviews7.

In a letter to Jacques Doucet dated October 30, 1922 (OC1, p. 642-643)8, which proposes the manuscript of the Twenty-Five Poems for sale and explains the genesis of the collection, Tzara alludes primarily to the poems that had appeared in the reviews Sic and Nord-Sud, through the intermediary of Apollinaire, Reverdy (director of Nord-Sud) and P. Albert-Birot (director of Sic), emphasizing at the end of his letter the interest shown following the publication of the Twenty-Five Poems by "Apollinaire, Reverdy, Braque, Breton, Soupault...". He only evokes Italian reviews in second position, whereas chronologically Tzara's publications there are prior. No doubt to symbolically put futurism in the background, at a time when relations with this movement are strongly degraded9. The pejorative tone that Tzara uses to evoke his past links with the futurists is flagrant10 and, one might say in bad faith, because it does not correspond to the reality of his engagement with regard to Italy: his interest exists from 1915 at the departure from Romania11 and becomes an intense activism in 1916 and 1917 (travel, correspondence, exchanges)12. Parallel to this the futurist influence is minimized. Yet incontestably, futurism as we will see, exerted a not negligible role on Tzara.

The Context of the Stage: Poems "to Shout and to Dance"

The Role of Futuro-Expressionism

Tzara in his letter to Doucet is particularly severe for three of the Twenty-Five Poems published in Italian reviews and written in 1916: "The White Leprous Giant of the Landscape," "Pélamide," "Movement," to which must be added "Sainte." He speaks of the "excessive brutality" of these poems too "declamatory." Tzara thereby reveals the particular character of these texts: their destination to the stage. Several of the Twenty-Five Poems were declaimed at the dada evening of May 12, 1917 and reflect the scenic deliriums of the dada evenings of 1916, such as the verbal whirlwind of the Zurich Chronicle restores them to us13. And, despite Tzara's regrets and denials, we can only recognize a very innovative aspect: their performative dimension, modeled on the scenic gesture put at the service of a rhythmic, dynamic and jarring expressivity, influenced in parallel by expressionist dramaturgy14 also conducive to exacerbation. Now in Zurich the founders of Dada are mostly from German expressionism (Ball, Huelsenbeck, Arp, Serner etc.15) and themselves impregnated with futurism.

Particularly remarkable in this regard are "The White Leprous Giant of the Landscape" and "Pélamide," insolent, punctuated with onomatopoeias, unexpected sounds, vowels, words borrowed from foreign languages or invented:

bonjour sans cigarette tzantzanga ganga
bouzdouc zdouc nfoùnfa mbaah mbaah nfoùnfa
les bateaux nfoùnfa nfoùnfa nfoùnfa
car il y a des zigzags sur mon âme et beaucoup de rrrrrrrrrrrrrr ("The White Leprous Giant of the Landscape")

The reader-listener, drawn into an infernal dance, is at the same time insulted as was the norm on the dada stage:

ici le lecteur commence à crier
il commence à crier commence à crier puis dans ce cri il y a des flûtes qui se multiplient des corails
le lecteur veut mourir peut-être ou danser et commence à crier
il est mince idiot sale il ne comprend pas mes vers il crie ("The White Giant")

The entire first half of "Pélamide" consists of sounds, and the first three verses exclusively of vowels or consonants:

a e ou o youyouyou i e ou o
youyouyou
drrrrrdrrrrdrrrrgrrrrgrrrr
morceaux de durée verte voltigent dans ma chambre
a e o i ii i e a ou ii ii ventre
montre le centre je veux le prendre
ambran bran bran et rendre centre des quatre
beng bong beng bang
où vas-tu iiiiiiiiupft
machiniste l'océan a ou ith
a o u ith i o u ath a o u ith o u a ith ("Pélamide")

The effects of rhythm, cadence are moreover recurrent in the poems of 1916:

vibre vibre vibre dans la gorge métallique des hauteurs
(…)
écoute écoute écoute j'avale mbampou et ta bonne volonté
prends danse entends viens tourne bois vire ouhou ouhou ouhou ("Movement")

Noël Arnaud's judgment on The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Antipyrine applies perfectly to these texts:

Dada's will to be spectacle through exchange, in complete incoherence, of words... or projectiles between the hall and the stage, theater where each character says what he wants without concern for the other, where cries and words fly like so many bullets with ricochets16.

Noël Arnaud joins in this W. Benjamin who already wrote, in chapter XIV of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility (1939), that with dadaism, "from attractive spectacle for the eye or seductive sonority for the ear, the work of art [had become] projectile." Only an aesthetics of shock, provoking the spectators, responded according to him to the exigencies of the time. Mercilessly destroying the auratic potential of the work and therefore any possibility of "losing oneself in contemplation," the dada work produced, against the "recollection" of the "degenerate bourgeoisie" a force of dispersion – modern modality of experience" –, a salutary "very powerful distraction," and became "an object of scandal," a "public outrage"17.

The Stakes of Phoneticism: Between Primitivism, Phoneticism and Polyglottism

From Primitivism to Polyglottism

W. Benjamin evokes in the same text the "barbaric manifestations" of Dada. To explain the cries and sounds, one must indeed refer to other experiments than futurist ones: Negro poems and polyglot poems.

One recognizes in the already cited poems phonetic transcriptions of Negro songs put at the service of deconstruction. As he reminds J. Doucet in 1922, Tzara in Zurich was transcribing Negro poems at this time (OC 1, p. 441-489). Negro poems enter for an essential part in the Zurich evenings of 1916 and 1917, on the model of German expressionist cabarets. Tzara reads verses from the Kinga, Loritja, Ba-Konga tribes and publishes in Sic in 1917 and 1918 two notes on Negro art and poetry (OC 1, p. 394-395 and 400-401), both addressed to J. Doucet with the manuscript of the Twenty-Five Poems. Nothing very original one will say, all the moderns (the cubists, Apollinaire, Cendrars etc.) were fascinated by Negro culture18. But Tzara uses primitive inspiration to conceive the most revolutionary elements of Dada: invention of a subversive poetic language, reflection of primitive spontaneity, insult to civilization. His first collection, unaccomplished, of attempt at syntactic destruction (containing sketches of the Twenty-Five Poems) was called Mpala Garoo. And in Dada 2 (December 1917) two translated poems, from the Loritja tribe, strangely resemble certain of the Twenty-Five Poems.

But in terms of polyglottism, an explanation never comes alone. Some of these sonorities indeed allow one to hesitate between Negro and ... Romanian, which Tzara sometimes integrates very legibly in his poems:

tu dois être ma pluie mon circuit ma pharmacie nu maî plânge [in Romanian: "don't cry anymore"] nu maî plânge veux-tu ("The Great Lament of My Obscurity Two")

More significantly, the poems are filled with these series in which connoisseurs of Romanian literature have found a constitutive element of their poetic tradition. If we believe Vasile Maruta for example19, Tzara seems to have remembered rhythms, word games, onomatopoeias etc. belonging to a Romanian poetic and popular fund of derision present in tales, popular poems, proverbs, sayings, childish word games. Vasile Maruta even gives us the precise meaning, in Romanian, of the last verses of "The White Leprous Giant of the Landscape": meteorological incantations from ancient beliefs of Thracian civilization ("trac"), names given to Christmas or Easter cakes, to family members, or to objects:

nbaze baze baze regardez la tiare sousmarine qui se dénoue en algues d'or
hozondrac trac
nfoùnda nbabàba nfoùnda tata
nbabàba20

The ambiguity is nevertheless allowed in the last two verses... of which one can wonder if it's Negro, Romanian, or childish language.

The polyglot internationalist claim is flagrant, in this same year 1916, in one of the great dada novelties, the simultaneous poems: "The Admiral Seeks a House to Rent" is a score in three languages declaimed at the same time, of which several passages are syllables shouted by the protagonists: "Ahoi ahoi," "prrrza chrrrza" "hihi Yabomm hihi Yabomm hihi hihi hihiiiii" "uru uru uro uru uru uro uru uru uru uro pataclan patablan" etc., "oh yes yes yes yes" etc., series repeated several times. All this to the sound of instruments (whistle, clapper and bass drum) which are precisely those evoked by "The White Giant":

dalibouli obok et tombo et tombo son ventre est une grosse caisse
ici intervient le tambour major et la cliquette

Phoneticism in the Air of the Time: Toward Abstraction

But other readings of these poems are still possible because phoneticism is in the air of the time and Raoul Hausmann will establish its history21. What is certain is that the phoneticism of the Twenty-Five Poems differs from Ball's mystical phoneticism, liturgical, solemn, that which he experiments with on the Zurich stage with, for example, "gadji beri bimba"22. It also differs from Marinetti's recommendations who, from 1912, pleads for "direct, imitative, elementary, realistic" onomatopoeia. Syllables and letters spread across the pages of Zurich reviews, in texts written by futurists or by P. Albert-Birot who produces phonetic poems "to shout and to dance"23.

If one listens to Tzara himself, the vowel rather puts us on the track of abstract or cubist claim: it is a material integrated into the poem in the manner of external elements inserted into cubist painters' canvases. In his letter to J. Doucet, he evokes as major novelty of the Twenty-Five Poems this introduction of elements foreign to poems, "judged unworthy to be part of it, like newspaper phrases, noises and sounds" (non-imitative). This idea already figured in a text read by Tzara during the dada evening of July 14, 1916, "The Noise Poem" (OC I, p. 551-552):

I introduce real noise to reinforce and accentuate the poem. In this sense it is the first time that objective reality is introduced into the poem, corresponding to the reality applied by the cubists in canvases.

Tzara insists in this presentation on the dada quest for "intensity," "primary elements," of scansion by children and "the most primitive elements":

Through the vowel poem (...) that I invented, I want to link primitive technique and modern sensibility. I start from the principle that the vowel is the essence, the molecule of the letter, and consequently the primitive sound.

Finally the vowel presents a great advantage: it condenses the primitive and abstraction, an obsession of Tzara. In 1916, he tries vowel poems, "La Panka" or "La dilaaaaaation des volllllcaaans" (OC I, p. 511-512) and cites in his letter to J. Doucet his abstract poem "Toto-Vaca" – actually a mystification24 – supposedly "composed of pure sounds invented by [him] and containing no allusion to reality." Tzara was here making his compatriot Isou lie who would later accuse him of having remained at "word poetry," refusing the integral assassination of meaning by "letter poetry."

Deconstruction/Construction, Three Essential Modalities: Futurist Words in Freedom, Collage

Futurist Words in Freedom

Introducing the vowel into poetry is already a work of deconstruction that plays with classical codes. Eluard in July 1919 asked Tzara: "Have you made or unmade all this?" In reality the enterprise of sentence deconstruction had been initiated in Romania under the influence of symbolism (Corbière, Laforgue) and more radically of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. The "futurist words in freedom" complete this approach (substantives arranged at random of their birth, verbs in infinitive to annihilate subjectivity, abolition of adjectives and adverbs, destruction of the "I" in literature25), without one being able to always distinguish them from the syncopated vertical series of German expressionist poets such as Stramm, or Schwitters whose poems of this type Tzara will publish in his review Der Zeltweg in November 1919.

But Tzara once again subverts the systems. Certainly the "words in freedom" are well there, arranged horizontally or vertically on the page, juxtaposed without logical links. But they are interspersed with fragments of dialogue, underlying conversations – perhaps a reminder of Apollinaire –, more intimate pauses, creating a dynamic of desire in the verbal chain. Certainly the dislocation of grammar and ellipses are the rule of the game and lexical jumps and syncopes proliferate:

les ponts déchirent ton pauvre corps est très grand voir ces ciseaux de voie lactée et découper le souvenir en formes vertes ("Glass Cross Peaceful")

But the spirit of system is abolished, here are some proofs: the persistence of the "I," banned by Marinetti, of the lament, of sentimentality, what G. Browning calls the "litany of the blue nothingness," a truly obsessive theme:

mon organe amoureux est bleu
je suis mortel monsieur bleubleu
("Yellow Cold")

souffrance ma fille du rien bleu et lointain
ma tête est vide comme une armoire d'hôtel
("The Great Lament of My Obscurity Two")

Certainly again, there are well verbs in infinitive without subject (14% of verb usage tells us Marguerite Bonnet), as in "The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three" or "Spring," of which several verses begin with an infinitive. But in these two cases, the infinitive does not make system, it alternates with conjugated forms: 64% of presents are counted by M. Bonnet.

Often moreover the verses organize themselves around a few words relaunched by rhythmic organization or by repetition procedures:

les ciseaux les ciseaux les ciseaux et les ombres
les ciseaux et les nuages les ciseaux les navires
("The White Giant")

Or by derivation procedures, paronomasia, in the manner of nursery rhymes:

sur des maisons basses plus basses plus hautes plus basses
le train de nouveau le veau spectacle de la tour du beau je reste sur le banc qu'importe le veau le beau le journal
("Little Town in Siberia")

Or again by thematic associations: "Retreat" opens on a column of words in freedom that seem to mimic the gesture of a child leafing through an album, in echo perhaps to the Rimbaldian modernity of the "little books of childhood" in "Alchemy of the Verb":

oiseaux enfance charrues vite
auberges
combat aux pyramides
18 brumaire
le chat le chat est sauvé
entrée
pleure
valmy, vire vire rouge
pleure
dans le trou trompette lents grelots
pleure

Relances and ruptures draw sequences, in which one finds internal rejections within verses, constituting "grafts," according to Michel Murat26, or intrusive words. The combinations are innumerable27, at the whim of the "dadaist desiring machine" that Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus28 opposes to the futurist machinery.

Innovation: Collage at the Service of Deconstruction

Tzara's predilection for words arranged at random and freed from grammatical constraints is designated by Aragon by the term collage29, which follows the method dictated in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" (1920), a little ironic manual of the genre and, according to G. Browning, "coherent statement of the intentional incoherence of the poem." This form of collage is also an affirmation of the materiality of words, which takes into account their internal force, their intrinsic expressivity, and is not far from Raoul Hausmann's analyses in 1968 in "Materials-Collages," easily transposable to the word:

Materials are not inert, on the contrary, they possess an expressive force that one must discover, to demonstrate that they are animated. This is the hidden but revealing character of collage.30

Tzara in 1953 in "Gestures, Punctuation and Poetic Language" for his part emphasizes the "emotional shock" provoked by the collage of words and ellipses:

The poetic image should result from this unusual approach of words, just as the enunciation of a single word or sound could suffice to create it. (oc v, p. 238-239)

But there exists another form of collage in the Twenty-Five Poems: fragments of verses from Nostradamus's Centuries are integrated into several poems. Marcel Janco has recounted31 the shock provoked on the dadaists by this obscure, abstract, but very expressive poetry and conducive to the invention of a new language. Hence the plagiarism, that is to say the unreferenced citation, this type of collage which is not an addition to an already constructed form, as with the cubists, but "creates its own plastic"32. Gordon Browning has studied these borrowings very closely33. At least five of the Twenty-Five Poems use this procedure: "Drugstore Conscience," "Bitter Wing Evening" and the three "Laments." In "The Lament of My Obscurity Three," G. Browning has identified several fragments of quatrains from the Centuries (below in bold characters) and attempted to interpret their utilization. The beginning of the text, he tells us, is clear, founded on games of progressive obscurity (in the physical sense of the term): twilight, filtered light (with us the flowers of the clocks light up and the feathers encircle the clarity), then on the lament (my son / my son), then on the theme of the poet's physical degeneration and his nothingness (we are too thin), until this verse: "crystals points without force fire burned the basilica (Centuries, VIII, II),

From this evocation of biblical punishment, the poem hesitates between degradation and ascension, structuring ambivalence of the three laments, before reintroducing three last "obscure" verses from Nostradamus:

Vers le nord par son fruit double
Comme la chair crue
Faim feu sans (VIII, 18, VIII, 17)

The "Lament One," enriched with such fragments, has a manifestly biblical tone:

les aigles de neige viendront nourrir le rocher
où l'argile profonde changera en lait
et le lait troublera la nuit les chaînes sonneront
la nuit composera des chaînes (…)
le sceptre au milieu parmi les branches

The iron changed into wine and salt is a fundamental reference, which one also finds in the twenty-sixth poem of 1946, "Salt and Wine," then unpublished but older, woven with fragments from the Centuries.

The observation of collages borrowed from Nostradamus in "Drugstore Conscience" has allowed G. Browning to explicate the persistent notion of obscurity, thanks to the comparison with a variant of publication in review, taken from an old Romanian poem and containing this verse:

il faisait tellement obscur que les paroles étaient lumière

The obscurity of the Twenty-Five Poems would in fact be interpretable as blinding light, G. Browning tells us, but also Tzara in his "Note on Poetry" sent with the manuscript of the Twenty-Five Poems:

Obscurity is productive if it is light so white and pure that our neighbors are blinded by it. From their light, forward, begins ours. Their light is for us, in the mist, the microscopic and infinitely tight dance of the elements of shadow in imprecise fermentation. Is not the matter dense and sure in its purity?

Browning concludes that plagiarism, whether it be collage of verses written by others or drawing lots of words in the newspaper, is constitutive of the work of negation inherent in dada creation. This technique, which goes back to Lautréamont, will pass through Guy Debord and will make, as we know, the delights of postmodernity...

The Production of Images

A Deconstruction at the Service of an Imaginary

The Twenty-Five Poems form a composite fabric of letters, words, syntagms, small sequences, tones, styles, places, temporalities. More broadly, deconstruction applies to images. In each poem one observes small discontinuous sequences, pieces of imaginaries roughly assembled: it is the "haute couture," which in 1919 is the title of a poem by Tzara written with Picabia34. This passage from "Movement" provides a fine sample:

que je sois dieu sans importance ou colibri
ou bien le phœtus [sic] de ma servante en souffrance
ou bien tailleur explosion couleur loutre
robe de cascade circulaire chevelure intérieure lettre qu'on reçoit à l'hôpital longue très longue
lettre
quand tu peignes consciencieusement tes intestins ta chevelure intérieure
tu es pour moi insignifiant comme un faux-passeport
les ramoneurs sons [sic] bleus à midi
aboiement de ma dernière clarté se précipite dans le gouffre de médicaments verdis ma chère mon parapluie
tes yeux sont clos les poumons aussi
du jet-d'eau on entend le pipi
les ramoneurs

Tzara's poetry is cosmic: it takes us to the four corners of the cosmos, "passing from ethereal heights to mineral depths, from shadow to light, from whirlwind to immobility" (H. Béhar, OC I, p. 646). But at the same time, from cosmic to cosmopolitan, this "discordant" poetry (H. Béhar), heterogeneous, makes heard different European imaginaries. The vocabulary studies undertaken systematically, even statistically, by Marie Anne Caws or Marguerire Bonnet, thus allow one to identify a dynamic imaginary close to futurism in painting: impression of a space animated by ascensional or concentric movements, universe in rotation, prey to vertigo, to metamorphoses of materials (liquefaction, crystallization), of colors, of lights, of figures. Beyond the poems published in futurist reviews, the series of "Laments" abundantly uses whirlwinds, spirals, or ascensional spurts:

froid tourbillon zigzag de sang (…)
les souvenirs en spirales rouges brûlent le cerveau (…)
tour de lumière la roue féconde des fourmis bleues (…)
les paratonnerres qui se groupent en araignées (…)

Some visions are borrowed from futurist urban myths, from its electrical sensations, its distractions, spun in notations borrowed from nature:

les jets d'eau agrandiront les usines
("Drugstore Conscience")

Je téléphone ailes et tranquillité d'un instant de limite construire en colonnes de sel: des
lampes de nuage neige et lampions de musique zigzag proportions anneaux monts de jaune
jaune jaune jaune o l'âme qui siffla la strophe du tuyau jauni en sueur d'encensoir
("Bitter Wing Evening")

War or speed, which constitute the mimetic themes of the new poetry according to Marinetti, are in Tzara forces in action that combine alliterations and images:

concentration intérieure craquement des mots qui crèvent crépitent les décharges électriques des gymnotes l'eau qui
se déchire
quand les chevaux traversent les accouplements lacustres
toutes les armoires craquent
la guerre
là-bas
("Sainte")

On speed Tzara writes in his "Note on Poetry," joined to the manuscript addressed to Doucet and likely to become the preface of the collection:

The poem pushes or digs the crater, is silent, kills, or cries along the accelerated degrees of speed.

What is Specifically Borrowed from Expressionism

This futurist imaginary sometimes merges with the expressionist imaginary, pessimistic and morbid, and more frequently represented. The proximity between the symbolism of Rimbaud, Laforgue, Maeterlinck or Verhaeren, recognized inspirers of Tzara from Romania, and expressionism, has been demonstrated, notably by J.M. Palmier35. The atmospheres of decomposition or apocalypse, proper to the writers of this movement (G. Benn, G. Heym, E. Lasker-Schüler, G. Trakl) and recurrent in Tzara's First Romanian Poems, are omnipresent in the Zurich texts, beginning with The First Adventure and The Manifesto, which use the images of apocalyptic messianism:

We (...) prepare the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition. [Dada Manifesto 1918]

M. Bonnet has inventoried the expressionist motifs in Twenty-Five Poems and De nos oiseaux36: visions of apocalypse, mutilated or fragmented bodies, monsters or hybrid creatures, painful parturitions, ideas of putrefaction, distortion of forms, phenomena of disturbing synesthesia. Colors (a palette blue, yellow, green, red) decompose. In "Yellow Cold" of 1915, disturbed synesthesias associate with unpleasant olfactory sensations, with putrefaction ("verdied vibrating ordure"), with confused lights ("under twisted twilights"), with morbid sensations ("feverish and rotten pedestrian and"). Evocations of conflagration, of nature in flames, of war or apocalypse, run through "The White Leprous Giant of the Landscape" and traverse "Bitter Wing Evening" or "Sun Night." Allusions to threats or divine punishment spread in "The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three," "Wise in Two," "Little Town in Siberia."

The motif of fragmentation "organ by organ" (staged in The Gas Heart in 1921, whose characters are named Eye, Mouth, Nose, Ear) is one of the most represented, the eye occupying a preponderant place, but also the mouth, the nose, the teeth,

o the newborn who transforms into a granite stone that becomes too hard and too heavy for his mother
("Sainte")

les ressorts du cerveau sont des lézards jaunis qui se liquéfient
("The Great Lament of My Obscurity Two")

nous sommes trop maigres
nous n'avons pas de bouche
nos jambes sont raides et s'entrechoquent
("The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three")

des cœurs et des yeux roulent dans ma bouche
("Little Town in Siberia")

If the expressionist theme of urban nightmare is infrequent there, some visions nevertheless relate to it:

les ponts déchirent ton pauvre corps est très grand voir ces ciseaux
("Glass Cross Peaceful")

Surreality Before Its Time

This imaginative power explains that this collection was, according to Aragon's expression, at the origin of the "greatest poetic trauma" that he felt, as also Breton, Soupault, Eluard. Beyond the mixing of simultaneist, futurist and expressionist imaginaries, poetry gives free rein to the surreal. The images of the Twenty-Five Poems are to be related to the definition of beauty according to Lautréamont: G. E. Clancier commenting on the reissue of the Twenty-Five Poems in 1947 writes:

from this Lautréamont short-circuit is born the violent, accusatory spark of the image
(OC I, p. 648)

How not to think also of the definition of the image according to Reverdy, cited by Breton in the 1924 Manifesto?

The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from the rapprochement of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relations of the two rapproached realities will be distant and just, the more the image will be
strong – the more it will have emotive power and poetic reality.

Objective chance wants that this definition of Reverdy published in Nord-Sud (March 1918) be chronologically close to that of Tzara in his "Note on Poetry" (March 1917) sent to Doucet: he speaks there of "elements (which) will be taken in different and distant spheres." Where Marinetti proposed univocal analogies, the Twenty-Five Poems propose images that one can qualify, without fearing anachronism, as surrealist:

tu portes, clouées sur tes cicatrices des proverbes lunaires
lune tannée déploie sur les horizons ton diaphragme
("Retreat")

acide qui ne brûle pas à la manière des panthères dans les cages
("The Great Lament of My Obscurity Two")

A group of poems from 1917 ("The Lion Tamer Remembers," "Remarks," "Spring," dedicated to Arp, "White Crystal Jump," to Janco) draw from a more appeased, luminous, sentimental inspiration, and reflect the aesthetics of painter friends. These texts, that H. Béhar calls "songs of colored vision" or "art transpositions" (OC1, p. 644) are nevertheless invested with this surreal onirism:

regarde moi et sois couleur
plus tard
ton rire mange soleil pour lièvres pour caméléons
("The Lion Tamer")

une rose des vents avec tes doigts aux beaux ongles
le tonnerre dans des plumes voir (…)
les petits éclats de verreries dans le ventre des cerfs en fuite
("Spring")

voir jaune couler
ton cœur est un œil dans la boîte en caoutchouc
coller à un collier d'yeux
coller des timbres-postes sur tes yeux (…)
("White Crystal Jump")

The Visuality of the Page: The Constructive Aesthetics

I cannot finish without an allusion to the edition of the collection, since Tzara, editor of his own poetry37 in 1918 and later, with the complicity of plastic artists, here Arp, has made of this collection of the dada collection, recently republished in facsimile by the Dilecta editions, a particularly successful total art object.

All the deconstruction procedures that I have enunciated there contrast intensely with the typographic composition, in narrow, almost massive columns, which seems to contradict the principle of destructuring or the visual debt to words in freedom. Nothing to do with the sensation of dispersion on the pages of the reviews in which these poems were published. Yet there is no contradiction if one refers to the way in which Tzara himself in his Manifesto, qualified the perfect work of art, incarnated by his painter friends of the Lampisteries:

Absolute in purity of cosmic and ordered chaos…
(Dada Manifesto 1918)

In the "Notes on Painting" of 1917-1918 (OC I, p. 553-559), devoted to the painters of modernity, one notes that organic abstract simplicity plays a privileged role. In the article on Janco, Tzara writes:

[The abstract artist] carries on the canvas an organism that lives, that has its equilibrium, that is accomplished
like a protozoan and like an elephant.

In note 12 on Negro poetry (Sic, November 1918), creative work appears as the culmination of a constant dialogue between chaos and order, disorder and construction:

One creates an organism when the elements are ready for life.

Tzara and Arp have perfectly succeeded in this alliance in the Twenty-Five Poems. One would certainly need to know the part of J. Heuberger's editorial constraints to have an overall vision of the choices made. But, whatever the case, the organic order of the composition confers on the poems an affinity with Reverdy's spatialized poetry. Here again however Tzara subverts an existing style by the inequality of breaks. In any case the page is very different from what it is in reviews, where concessions to futurist visuality often dominate.

Arp's woodcuts play a major role in this living organism. They have been variously interpreted according to critics: flames, squids, crabs or human figures38. D. Leuwers sees in them "black ideograms," "free like stains," which "join the elementary signs of Tzara's poetry." Tzara in 1927 will pay homage to the painter's "ideographic alphabet":

And we decipher the nuclear history which in each variation contains the immense image of the
world,
as
easily as his mind marked the traces of his passage
on the sheet of
paper.39

Conclusion

The Twenty-Five Poems are a poetic manifesto and resonate in echo to dada experiments, against the background of mixing of European modernity currents:

• by their performative dimension first, theorized in the Dada Manifesto 1918, introducing an aesthetics of rhythm, cry and stage, issuing from futurism and expressionism.

• by the introduction into the poetic fabric of researches linked to language: abstract phoneticism testifies to Tzara's complicity with painters, Negro sound is at the service of dada primitive spontaneity, polyglottism at the service of cosmopolitan claim.

• by an aesthetics of contrast, provocation, shock, ellipsis, at the service of a "jarred, rocky language, abstractions taking body under the whip of concrete images, language always carried to the highest intensity, to howl in the storm to dominate the furious winds," founded on "a mixture of vocables, languages and enunciations destined to destabilize speech" (Noël Arnaud).

• by the deconstruction of syntax, the disarticulation of forms. Tzara is here at the origin of an entire tradition of deconstruct/construct in which A. Ginsberg, W. Burroughs, B. Gysin and the "cut up" artists will draw. Tzara seeks to "reach poetry through the destruction of the poem" (G.E. Clancier), as Isou, Godard or Debord will kill cinema by making films.

• by the oniric, surreal power, expression of an open creative totality, of a chaos which "is not a formless state, or a confused and inert mixture, but rather the place of a plastic and dynamic becoming"40, a "chaosmos" according to the portmanteau word fabricated by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, expressing at once chaos and the ordered world (cosmos in Greek).