Although Cocteau was never a member of the Surrealist movement, and in fact was criticized by the Surrealists, The Blood a Poet is often characterized as a Surrealist work. Its use of symbolic images and dream-like structure superficially suggest Surrealist preoccupations. However, Richard Abel, in French Film Theory and Criticism, distinguishes between their concerns: "In his introduction to Le Sang d'un poète, Cocteau seemed to literalize the Surrealists' mirror metaphor of the screen and take the poet/spectator through an elliptical, discontinuous series of 'dream' images that 'captured' his own 'poetic states.' These images may have been presented quite obviously through tricks . . . yet Cocteau's discourse itself clearly was framed within an idealist conception of the poet's superior awareness. . . The Surrealists themselves (or former Surrealists), by contrast, envisioned a narrative cinema that constituted a sequence of events analogous in its illogic and spatio-temporal discontinuity to that of the unconscious or dream and that worked on the spectator in such a way as to make him 'lose consciousness' and thus liberate his unconscious being." Antonin Artaud, in a letter to Jean Paulhan, January 22, 1932, wrote "The old quarrel between Cocteau and the Surrealists is absurd. For at bottom they are all the same and I assure you that anyone who was not aware of their petty bickering would put a film like L'Age d'or and a film like The Blood of a Poet on the same level, would throw them into the same bag, for one is just as irrelevant and pointless as the other... (T)he point is finally to produce the exemplary works of this poetry of the unconscious, this profound analogical poetry which I call poetry of the unconscious for lack of a better term, but which is the only poetry possible, the only true and possible poetry with metaphysical tendencies, on which films like The Blood of a Poet resolutely turn their back." In 1946, Cocteau recalled, "It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a Surrealist film. However, Surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. On the contrary, the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. . . At the time of the Blood of a Poet, I was the only one. . . to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth" (quoted by Herbert Reynolds in Through Surrealist Eyes). --Kathy Geritz