Poetry Is A Pipe

'Poetry is a Pipe' declared the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard after seeing Rene Magritte's painting, titled La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) . The Belgian Surrealist artist's famous 1929 painting shows the image of a pipe under which he wrote: Ceci n'est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe) . The painting, a concrete, or visual poem, rises as an intriguing paradox: It is an obvious lie which reveals the truth. While the image shows a pipe, a picture in fact is not an actual pipe but only an image, a visual representation of it. Thus, the facetious painting is a witty, simultaneous amalgam of truth and mendacity.