About Robert Desnos

These are four notebooks that reappeared at an auction in the fall of 2020. Four notebooks containing 120 poems including 86 unpublished by Robert Desnos. Written for the most part during the year 1936, they are the result of an original exercise that the poet imposed on himself, giving it the name of “forced poems”: to write, every evening, a poem before going to sleep. “With or without subject, tired or not, he will write. (…) Some evenings, the poem imposed itself, it had built itself during the day. Other times, with an empty brain, it was an unexpected theme that guided the hand rather than the thought. But it was not about automatic writing. We find, in this exceptional harvest of unknown texts, the bestiary that he will animate in his famous Chantefables, games of words and sounds, clearings and streets and strange protagonists, such as the Duke of Mouche or Monsieur Ducanard . A poetry releasing, in the hollow of the night, its fantastic imagination, capable of resisting all the shadows that lurk to disenchant us.

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