Surrealist Techniques - Automatism

Automatism

• Automatic drawing
• Automatic painting
• Automatic writing
• Automatic poetry is poetry written using the automatic method. It has probably been the chief surrealist method from the founding of surrealism to the present day. One of the oddest uses of automatic writing by a great writer was that of W. B. Yeats. His wife, a spiritualist, practised it, and Yeats put large chunks of it into his prose work, A Vision and much of his later poetry. Yeats, however, was not a surrealist.

Automatic poetry generators exist online, but they do not actually generate automatic poetry in this sense.

The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used the method of automatic text in his famous book I served a British king. One chapter in the book is written as a single sentence, and at the end of the book Hrabal endorses the use of automatic writing.