la grande permission

Years ago I interviewed John Ashbery for the Irish Times. He was reading in a small market town to the south of Dublin. It took me about an hour to drive down. It was a drizzling, shimmering spring afternoon. Many of his answers about his work and his aesthetic were eloquent. One in particular stuck with me for years. I asked him whether he was a surrealist and he told me that he himself had asked the French poet Henri Michuax the same question. No, Michaux replied, he was not a surrealist. But, for him, surrealism had been la grande permission.

—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)