Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript, signed at head, Aragon vous parle de lui-même, [1959]; 6pages in-4, with a few erasures and corrections. Very fine text by Aragon on his poetry (published in France Nouvelle, weekly of the French Communist Party, December 17, 1959). "How to speak of oneself when the world resounds with the sound of tragedy... and life swept away by the waters of Malpasset, Fréjus under the relentless rain, bodies dredged off the coast of Saint-Raphaël, and these dramas conveyed to me by the faces of Anne Philipe, Michèle Morgan [...] It's precisely tragedy that André Malraux, whose casualness in judging Racine I didn't much like, has made his hobbyhorse in national theaters. Blame him if you will. I don't feel like arguing with him [...] I can't deny him a sense of tragedy, and that's his business if he associates himself with this kind of comedy-bouffe that turns Ministers of Education or Culture into characters from Flers and Caillavet"... In connection with an anthology of his poems, Aragon evokes "these forgotten reflections, scattered throughout my life [...] A poem is dated like an article [...] so it is understandable that, rereading myself, I see, in the mirror, over my shoulder, a world that the verses as much as myself show me, the diary of the time crossed, the history of others, which is also my history". Aragon dwells on Feu de joie, written in 1918 and "published at the same time as André Breton's Mont de Piété, marked by this voluntary divorce from the Mallarmism of his early youth (which I may remain the only one to love against the poet himself), this extreme science of traditional verse, to throw himself into the fire of a modernism that was not yet surrealism". He recalls the genesis of Surrealism's "particular conjuration" around the magazine Littérature, with Soupault, Eluard, Tzara who came from Zurich "to explode the Dada bomb here", joining the Communist Party in 1927, and the clashes with his friends "over the very conception of poetry"; and Aragon then recopies a poem from Feu de joie, the Couplet de l'Amant d'Opéra, and wonders about certain poems directly linked to history... "We will only have been the circumstance, the trace of a step. Perhaps, however, whoever finds life beneath our words, behind the words the pulse of history, of our passage, of our futility, will be able to deduce both the road travelled, and the path of this Man to whom we capitalize like a fig leaf to statues, the meaning at least of his march, of our tragedy".