ovements and to achieve a new freedom without formal rules. This is what the writers of the time believed artists were achieving, and they applied this idea consciously to their work in order to produce a surrealist literature. They were only partially successful, and many of those who were most dedicated to this movement were not the most gifted writers of the time:
One cannot take AndrT Breton, the chief surrealist, at times a veritable Stalin with his purges, wholly seriously as a creative writer; his confusions require to be studied; he is a symptom of twentieth-century unease. . . For the truly gifted writers, on the other hand, surrealism provided a new beginning, a break with conventions; they went on to new pastures (Seymour-Smith 467).
Neruda fits this last statement, a poet who used surrealism as a beginning point for a new mode of expression. Surrealism was f
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