Although [Antonin] Artaud was an early participant in Surrealism (for a time he even headed The Central Bureau for Surrealist Research) and although a number of his most important works were written during that period, he is a writer who stands so defiantly outside the traditional norms of literature that it is useless to label his work in any way. Properly speaking, Artaud is not a poet at all, and yet he has probably had a greater influence on the poets who came after him than any other writer of his generation. 'Where others present their works,' he wrote, 'I claim to do no more than show my mind.' His aim as a writer was never to create aesthetic objects -- works that could be detached from their creator -- but to record the state of mental and physical struggle in which 'words rot at the unconscious summons of the brain.' There is no division in Artaud between life and writing -- and life not in the sense of biography, of external events, but life as it is lived in the intimacy of the body, of the blood that flows through one's veins. As such, Artaud is a kind of Ur-poet, whose work describes the processes of thought and feeling before the advent of language, before the possibility of speech. It is at once a cry of suffering and a challenge to all our assumptions about the purpose of literature.

Paul Auster, Introduction to The Random House Book of Twentieth-Centry French Poetry