Paul Éluard

Born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel on 14 December 1895, he shed his given name in 1916 for Paul Éluard, borrowed from his maternal grandmother. He joined the Dadaists, then became a founder and pillar of Surrealism, yoking the movement's dream-logic to hard political commitment through the Communist Party. When World War II arrived, he turned his gift inward and wrote poems against Nazism that passed from hand to hand in secret, the kind of verse that could get you killed for carrying it. He died 18 November 1952, remembered as the most naturally gifted of the French Surrealists — the one who made…