Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was one of the primary poets and writers of the Surrealist movement of 1924-1930. He wrote, and collaboratively wrote, many influential and celebrated books. Besides poetry, Desnos wrote on a wide range of subjects from film texts and criticism to novels. During WWII he became a poet of the resistance, but was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to several notorious concentration camps for the duration of the war. He died as a result of his internment. This is the most comprehensive anthology of the writings of Robert Desnos ever assembled and translated into the English language. The extensive poetry section is bilingual. The English translations are by the most renowned translators of Robert Desnos.

He stayed with the official surrealist movement in Paris for only six years but was pivotal during that time in shaping the surrealist notion of "transforming the world" through radical experiments with language and art, After leaving the group, Desnos continued his career of radio broadcasting and writing for commercials.

The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition.

An exciting new collection of the essential writings of surrealism, the European avant-garde movement of the mind’s deepest powers Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon created a movement that spread wildly to all corners of the globe, inspiring not only poetry but also artists like Joan Miro and René Magritte and cinematic works by Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí. As the editor, Mary Ann Caws, says, “Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.” Here are the gems of this major, mind-bending aesthetic, political, and humane movement: writers as diverse as Aragon, Breton, Dalí, René Char, Robert Desnos, Mina Loy, Paul Magritte, Alice Paalen, Gisèle Prassinos, Man Ray, Kay Sage, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are included here, providing a grand picture of this revolutionary movement that shocked the world.

This extensive and wide-ranging selection comprises the poetry of one of France's most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos. Hailed as the 'prophet' of the Surrealist movement by AndrE Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work completely underrepresented in the English language, with only his children's poems currently available in English translation. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.