He was born in the Bastille neighborhood of Paris and died in Czechoslovakia. He considered being born in such an interesting neighborhood one of the "objective coincidences" that enabled him to become a poet.
(1900-1945) French, poet and writer. He is one of the representatives of the surrealist movement. He was born in the Bastille neighborhood of Paris and died in Czechoslovakia. He considered being born in such an interesting neighborhood one of the "objective coincidences" that enabled him to become a poet.
He joined the Dadaist movement led by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who settled in Paris in 1919. The rapid loss of effectiveness of Dadaism in 1922 and the friendship he established with Benjamin Peret brought him closer to the first Surrealist grouping. In line with Freud's teachings, he participated in hypnosis sessions initiated to understand the "activities of the subconscious." In these meetings organized by Andre Breton and Peret, Desnos was one of those who expressed his "mood" in the purest way, free from all kinds of pressure.
Robert Desnos (4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945) was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.
His first important work was Deuil pour deuil (“Mourning for Mourning”), published in 1924. He attracted attention with the poetry vibe he created by using everyday language. Without binding himself to any force or logical rule, he captured the flashes of emotion that leaked from his subconscious to his consciousness and transformed them into words. Desnos's language is almost a dream language, rather than a tool that reflects the "dream state".
After 1926, Robert Desnos gradually began to break away from Surrealism. The fact that the movement began to be based on institutional patterns was contrary to Desnos' personality and expression. Desnos, who had a falling out with Breton in 1930, moved further away from the Surrealist movement.
For a while, he was involved in cinema, journalism, and radio program production. He developed the genre of radiophonic poetry. Besides these, he maintained the purest surrealist line in his poetry. Naturalness has always been the main starting point in Desnos' poetry. The tangle of images oscillating between dream and reality gave Desnos' poetic language a soft sarcasm.
Desnos, who participated in the Resistance Movement in France during World War II, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. He died of typhus a year later in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.