Robert Desnos is one of the early adherents of Surrealism, a movement from which he broke away in 1929. He shared with other Surrealists an interest in dreams, ‘second states’ and the subconscious; of all the group, he was the most gifted at drawing inspiration from the experiments in hypnosis and ‘automatic writing’, conducted with the hope of releasing the mind's imaginative potential and the wonders of the insolite. He discovered his own method of linking the surprises of the subconscious and the world of language. In Rrose Sélavy (1922 – 3), for example, a collection of wordgames apparently suggested to Desnos during his séances, it is the sounds and orthography of words which are left to generate the idea and the image, so that the rational process of shaping thoughts is abandoned and the colourful, but perfectly valid, unreason of language and the subconscious allowed to take flight. There are some surprisingly poetic results:

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But such cultivation of gratuitousness has its limits. His adeptness with language and his taste for the irrational develop very differently in A la Mystérieuse (1926) in which they are wedded to a more traditional and moving inspiration. An urgent love, and not some artificial mechanism, becomes the major force. Whether reciprocated or not, whether tender or cruel, it opens and closes the door easily into the poet's subconscious, spanning the frontiers between dream and reality, absence and presence, illusion and truth, confusing them as if they were one and the same thing, sometimes producing a refreshing ‘surreality’, sometimes a nebula of doubts.