British Surrealism, manifestation in Great Britain of Surrealism, a European movement in visual art and literature that flourished between World Wars I and II and a deliberate attempt to unite the conscious and unconscious in the creation of art. British Surrealism in its organized, communal form was a short-lived and somewhat local phenomenon of the 1930s and ’40s, limited mostly to groups in the cities of London and Birmingham, but it had a deep impact on British culture. Although David Gascoyne, the foremost poet of the movement, emphasized the native sources of British Surrealism adducing Jonathan Swift, Edward Young, Matthew Gregory