Poetry by Robert Desnos - Robert Desnos was a son of a café owner. He was born in Paris on 4 July 1900. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir. The first poems by Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the avant-garde review, Le Trait d’union (The hyphen), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title Rrose Selavy (based upon the name (pseudonym) of the popular French artist Marcel Duchamp). During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944. He was first deported to the Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz in occupied Poland, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and finally to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, where he died from typhoid, only weeks after the camp’s liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were accidentally destroyed following his death.