One of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th-century and hugely influential on the surrealist and Dadaist movements, Jean Cocteau worked in numerous media — film, visual arts, the stage, fiction, poetry — and collaborated with visual artists, choreographers and composers. The Blood of a Poet is his most widely known film. In the preface to this volume he says this about his method:
My relationship with the work was like that of a cabinetmaker who puts together the pieces of a table whom the spiritualists, who make the table move, consult.
The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.