Hugo :: Baudelaire :: Rimbaud :: Mallarmé :: Valéry :: Apollinaire :: Tzara :: Breton :: Aragon :: Eluard :: Desnos :: Home
Robert Desnos |
---|
Biography |
Robert Desnos was born in 1900 in Paris where he later attended commercial college and then worked as a clerk. Besides being one of the influential surrealists, he also worked as a journalist and a radio personality. He met Breton in 1919, who was so interested in Desnos' ability to practice automatic writing he later wrote about it in his book Nadja, but their friendship ended in 1929, when Desnos signed an attack that called Breton an ox. In 1926 Desnos wrote a volume of poems in quatrains, which strayed from more free forms towards the classic style of Baudelaire. In 1944 Desnos was arrested and spent time in a series of concentration camps until he died of typhoid. |
Poems |
J'ai tant rêvé de toi
J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité. J'ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués J'ai tant rêvé de toi qu'il n'est plus temps J'ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, Les espaces du sommeil |
Themes |
Desnos was a master of hypnotic sleeps, and his obsession with dream-states becomes a theme in his poems as he examined the intersections of waking and sleeping. Like Apollinaire, Desnos wrote about the modern city and enjoyed his lively neighborhood in Paris where he experienced both high and low culture. His poems reflect the intersections of these disparate cultures. Despite his early death his is considered to be one of the most influential lyricists of the 20th century. He believed in universal freedoms and maintained a sense of optimism until the end of his life. His obsession with wordplay culminated in experiments with language that highlighted the plastic nature of words and phrases. This wordplay shows the breakdown of communication that indicates the possibility of multiplicity of meaning. |
Bibliography |
Caws, Mary Ann. "TECHNIQUES OF ALIENATION IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF ROBERT DESNOS." Modern Language Quarterly 28.4 (Dec. 1967): 473. Eburne, Jonathan P. "The Edges of Surrealism." Journal of Modern Literature 26.3/4 (Summer2003 2003): 148-153. Elbon, Andrew. "Spoonerism as literary device in Desnos, Leiris, and Roubaud." Romanic Review 87.2 (Mar. 1996): 285. Kulik, William. "Life in the Present Tense." American Poetry Review 34.2 (Mar. 2005): 32-34. Thomas, Yves. "DU DÉSERT À LA RUE : LA FONCTION DES VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES DANS LA LIBERTÉ OU L'AMOUR ! DE ROBERT DESNOS." Romanic Review 95.1/2 (Jan. 2004): 29-39. |
Hugo :: Baudelaire :: Rimbaud :: Mallarmé :: Valéry :: Apollinaire :: Tzara :: Breton :: Aragon :: Eluard :: Desnos :: Home