Dada

Outraged at the carnage of World War I, which they attributed to the stupidity of bourgeois politicians, the dadaists strove to wipe the slate clean so that they could begin all over. Reducing aesthetic expression to its fundamental elements—sound and typography in poetry; sound, gesture, and action in theater; color and line in art—they experimented with new, uncorrupted genres. Besides reconstructing reality to more accurately reflect modern experience, they adopted an anti-art stance that revolutionized artistic expression. Adopting as their motto Tzara's declaration "Thought is made in your mouth," they strove to liberate language in particular.

Like their artist colleagues, the dada poets wished to stimulate thought and to achieve new states of consciousness by exploring their medium. While the dadaists valued scandal above all else, they also prized spontaneity. Both tenets derived from the fanatical devotion to freedom that characterized the dada adventure. Just as the dadaists were interested in the activity of the mind, so their preoccupation with spontaneity and the gratuitous reflected their fascination with prelogical experience and thought. In attempting to grasp our being in its primitive coherence (or incoherence), they strove to discover absolute psychological reality. In particular, the dadaists believed that the playful dimension of art offered a path to liberation. Although their poetry was necessarily verbal, it communicated on a primal level by means of images, emotions, and rhythms. Combining discursive and nondiscursive strategies, the dadaists discovered that words could be used to convey information situated outside the linguistic arena.