Glossary of Poetic Terms

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada embraces nonsense, irrationality, and intuition instead of the prevailing values of logic and reason. Dada’s nihilism and rejection of traditional aesthetic values were emblematic of the founding group’s rejection of elitism and of the cultural and moral instability following World War I. Founding member Tristan Tzara wrote in his “Dada Manifesto 1918” that “Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity,” recognizing “no theory … (or) [laboratories] of formal ideas.” Tzara’s poems, such as “Speaking Alone,” reflect a mature form evolved from his early Dadaist work. In the visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence; Dadaism also gave rise to surrealism.