...That dazzling figure of black light, the Comte de Lautreamont. In the eyes of certain contemporary poets, Maldoror and the Poesies sparkle with incomparable brilliance. They are the expression of a total revelation that seems to exceed human possibility. All of modern life, in its most specific aspects, is sublimated in one stroke. His backdrops revolve on the swinging doors of ancient suns that illuminate the sapphire floor; the silver-beaked gaslamp, winged and smiling, that glides over the Seine; the green membranes of space and the shops of Rue Vivienne, prey to the crystalline rays from the center of the earth. An absolutely virgin eye lies in wait for the scientific perfection of the world, disregarding the consciously utilitarian nature of this perfection, situating it with all the rest in the light of apocalypse. Definitive apocalypse: in this work, the great instinctive pulsbeats are lost and exalted on contact with an asbestos cage containing a white-hot heart. For centuries to come, the most audacious things that can be thought or undertaken will find their magic law formulated here in advance.—Andre Breton on Lautreamont