Desnos, Robert

Robert Desnos (July 4, 1900 - June 8, 1945) was a French surrealist poet.

Born in Paris, he was a bad student, but fell in love with literature and began publishing poems. He became a friend of Benjamin Péret and in 1922 began practising automatic writing, notably under hypnosis. He fell in love with the singer Yvonne George, but the crowds of fans also obsessed with her ensured that his love was impossible. He wrote several poems for her including those in his collection La liberté ou l'amour (1927), which was condemmned for obscenity.

In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem about solitude, curiously written in quatrains like classics, more similar to Baudelaire than Breton. In 1936, he tried writing a poem a day for a year.

Desnos was one of the most active members of the Surrealist group, and was the prophet of the movement according to André Breton.

During World War II Desnos worked for the French Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo on February 22, 1944 and sent to Auschwitz before being transferred to Theresienstadt. There he contracted typhoid, which killed him. He is interred at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

Desnos's poetry has been set to music by a number of composers, including Witold Lutosławski (in Les Espaces du Sommeil, 1975, and Chantefleurs et Chantefables, 1991) and Francis Poulenc ("Dernier poème", 1956).

Other Works

• Corps et biens (1930)
• État de veille (1943)