Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos (1900–1945) was a French poet born in Paris who was among the most inventive writers of the Surrealist movement. He joined the group in 1922 and quickly distinguished himself through experiments with automatic writing, dream states, and hypnotic trances — sessions during which, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, he would generate extended chains of puns, anagrams, and poetic association. André Breton described him as the most gifted of the Surrealists at surrendering to the unconscious.

His work engaged freely with popular culture, music-hall, radio, and the emerging culture of mass media, and he became a prolific writer of song lyrics, radio scripts, and journalism alongside his poetry. Key collections include C'est les bottes de 7 lieues Cette phrase "Je me vois" (1926), Corps et biens (1930), which gathered his major work of the 1920s, and Fortunes (1942). He also wrote under several pseudonyms — Rrose Sélavy (borrowing Duchamp's alias), and others. He collaborated with photographers and filmmakers, and his erotic novel La Liberté ou l'Amour! (1927) was seized by the authorities. He broke with Breton's group in 1929 but continued his poetic output throughout the 1930s in a freer, often lyrical mode. During the Second World War, Desnos worked for the French Resistance and wrote clandestine poetry. He was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1944, deported through several concentration camps, and died of typhus at Theresienstadt in June 1945, weeks after liberation.