Myth, dream and poetry
In spite of general claims about British Surrealism's purportedly more moderate adoption of Surrealist tenets, the interest in occultism was not dimmed in Britain, even if it was not shown as openly as in the spiritist seances of Andre Breton. Rather, British Surrealist poetry involves a more internal apprehension of the occult in its access to the collective unconscious through myth and dream. The lure of the esoteric a l'anglaise is performed through the analysis of three key 1930s British Surrealist texts: Hugh Sykes Davies's Petron (1935), David Gascoyne's Man's Life is this Meat (1936) and Roland Penrose's The Road is Wider than Long (1939). In these works, the occult is revealed in a variety of forms. These range from Sykes Davies's algolagnic and gratifyingly painful experience of fate in relation to unconscious desire, to Gascoyne's apocalyptical prophecies and cosmogonic visions and Penrose's recovery of a pre-industrial collective past and the myth of the primitive. Through incantatory rhythms a...