Robert DESNOS.

Lot 83
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15000 - 20000 EUR
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Result : 13 000EUR
Robert DESNOS.
Four books of autograph poems. No place or date [1940-1941]. 3 school notebooks (ca. 22 x 17.5 cm) and 1 oblong sketchbook (20.5 x 27.5 cm); modern red half-maroquin slipcases. Exceptional set, hitherto unknown: the four notebooks contain a total of 123 autograph poems, 85 of which are unpublished. 19 poems were published during Robert Desnos' lifetime in the collection Fortunes (1942) and in État de veille (1943). 18 poems were published in 1999 in the OEuvres edition, based on another manuscript. "The first poems in this collection [État de veille] date from 1936. Throughout that year and until the spring of 1937, I was forced to write a poem every night before going to sleep. With or without a subject, tired or not, I faithfully observed this discipline. I thus filled a series of notebooks where, one can imagine, the waste was great when, in 1940, I undertook to reread them. Some of them, however, appear in Fortunes under the general title of "The Fighting Gates". The present poems are not published here in their original text. They have sometimes been completely redone" (Note in État de veille, in OEuvres, Gallimard, collection Quarto, pp. 998-999). The four notebooks gathered here constitute one of the rare testimonies of this experience of "forced" writing exposed by the poet. Resulting from the rewriting work begun by Desnos during the Occupation, this collection constitutes a veritable laboratory for future publications. They mark Desnos' return to poetry after a period of intense radio activity in the years 1936/1937 - a return to oneself that is sometimes difficult and practiced with critical hindsight, notes Marie-Claire Dumas, whom we would like to thank for her information that is as precious as it is generous. The location of the notebooks containing the first draft of the forced poems remains unknown to this day. As for the eighteen poems published by Marie-Claire Dumas in 1999 in Les OEuvres de Desnos published by G
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