I. Overview II. Definitions III. History I. Overview One of the principal experimental movements of the 20th c., surrealism grew from a Parisbased group of young poets and artists to a broadly international intellectual phenomenon, gaining adherents and fellow travelers throughout the world from the 1920s through the late 1960s. The word s urreal- ism designates two major poetic inclinations. It refers, first, to the active, organized network of friends and collaborators who contributed to surrealist periodicals, met regularly in cafés, and signed the group's political tracts. At the same time, surrealism also signifies a more general tendency in poetry, plastic arts, and thought associated with experimental techniques such as automatic writing, collage , the game of "exquisite corpse," and the analysis of dreams. For André Breton (1896-1966), a leading poet and principal theorist of the movement, the distinction between a committed surrealist practice and a generalized surrealism…