Biography
Born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in 1907.
During his brief participation in the surrealist movement, he published with Breton and Eluard the collective work, Ralentir Travaux. He preserved the technique of automatic writing, but only to move beyond it.
In 1934, he gathered all the surrealist poetry of the time under the title " Le Marteau Sans Maître /", and then quietly broke his ties with the group. He explained his rupture with the group in a letter to Benjamin Péret in 1935 in the following terms: " /Surrealism needed to be dissolved gracefully in order to protect it from the humiliation of becoming centenarian. But aren't you fatalistic? Was the descent of Sade, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont entirely intellectual? Seeing this pathetic compromise coming, I refused to sanction it. I am leaving this circus. "
The war in Spain incited him to participate (Placart pour le Chemin des Ecoliers, 1937). As of 1940, Char joined the French Resistance, where he became renowned. His poetry, written in an urgent tone, became a celebration of the movement (Fureur et Mystère, 1948). After the Second World War, he pursued his personal goal of reaching a high degree of poetic strictness (La Parole en Archipel, 1962).
At the end of his life, concerned about the environment, he became one of the french nuclear energy project's strongest critics. He died in Paris in 1988.
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