Though Michel Leiris defined himself as a poet until the end of his life, long after he had abandoned poetry for prose, criticism has consistently ignored his poetry. Through semiotic analyses of Leiris' surrealist collection Failles, this book shows that it is the system, peculiar to poetry, of signifying by series of equivalent metaphors that forms the basis of all of Leiris' writings. Just as a single concept may be expressed by the most disparate metaphors, so Leiris would later try to recapture in prose the single poetic rule underlying the seemingly divergent phenomena of his life: the immobile amid the mobile, the one behind the many.