Perpetual motion and poetic form in the interwar avant-garde: Gunnar Ekelöf’s ‘Perpetuum mobile’ (1955) and Francis Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918)

This essay explores the relations between music, poetry, and sound recording in Parisian interwar avant-garde culture, focusing on the transnational dissemination and reception of surrealist aesthetics. It argues that French composer Francis Poulenc’s solo-piano piece Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918) forms a crucial background for Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem ‘Perpetuum mobile’ (drafted in 1932, published in 1955) and situates this connection within the wider context of relations between music and poetry in avant-garde Paris in the interwar period. The aim is to identify and analyse how avant-garde music, recording techniques, and related listening practices formed part of the transnational history of avant-garde poetry.