In many ways, Surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton had direct influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish. Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.According to William Lawlor: "André Breton, the founder of surrealism and Joans's mentor and friend, famously called Joans the 'only Afro-American surrealist' (qtd. by James Miller in _Dictionary of Literary Biography_ 16: 268)", p. 159, Beat culture: lifestyles, icons, and impact, ABC-CLIO, 2005, , . Ted Joans said, "The late André Breton the founder of surrealism said that I was the only Afro-American surrealist and welcomed me to the exclusive surrealist group in Paris", p. 102, For Malcolm: poems on the life and the death of Malcolm X, Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs, eds, Broadside Press, Detroit, 1967. There is some question about how familiar Breton was with Afro-American literature: "If it is true that the late André Breton, a founder of the surrealist movement, considered Ted Joans the only Afro-American surrealist, he apparently had not read Kaufman; at any rate, Breton had much to learn about Afro-American poetry." Bernard W. Bell, "The Debt to Black Music", Black World/Negro Digest March 1973, p. 86.
