Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words

“This book traces the development of the major themes in the work of the essential modern poet-playwright, Antonin Artaud. As a young man, Artaud complained that he could neither find the words to express his inner being nor succeed in making language and reality coincide. Toward the end of his life this complaint gave way to a violent and apocalyptic denunciation of literature and language. His work reflects the dilemma of our culture, which has lost all faith in rationality and yet continue to analyze the sickness with the voice of reason, for it has found no other. Artaud’s debt to certain movements and philosophical currents – notably surrealism and Eastern mysticism – is acknowledged but at the same time the book shows that the mark of his own agonized sensibility renders everything he wrote undeniably his own. As Janet Flanner points out in her introduction to this volume, Artaud held “extraordinary theories of audience participation and the great cruel power of violence, which both ally him posthumously to the theater and to the world and to the people of today.””

Clarion Books, 1970 Softcover edition. Discoloration to both wraps, along with wear/edges to corners. Light splaying to wraps.