Robert Desnos (July 4, 1900 - June 8, 1945) was a French surrealist poet.
He was born in Paris. He was a bad student, but in love with literature and began publishing poems. He became a friend of Benjamin Péret and in 1922 he began practicing 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 quatraines like classics, more similar to Baudelaire than Breton. In 1936, he tried working a poem a day for a year.
Desnos was one of the most active members of the Surrealist group, 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. His is interred at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.