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Robert Desnos




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 ).

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OTHER WORKS

  • ''Corps et biens'' ( 1930 )

  • ''État de veille'' ( 1943 )