Tall and beautiful with violet eyes, Yvonne George, a Belgian actress and singer, was the woman who inspired many of Desnos' greatest poems. His unanswered love for her was so strong it became an obsession and for some time the only inspiration of his poetry, resulting in two collections quintessentially Surrealistic. In them an atmosphere of "the marvellous" the juxtaposition of the exotic, and the ordinary, "the fabulous taken for granted" is created, and dream and waking reality become indistinguishable. A la mysterieuse (To the mysterious Woman), published in 1926, contains seven poems that read like love letters to the woman he cannot have in flesh, though her presence haunts him day and night. She is a phantom who becomes more real to him than she ever could be "in reality". In "The Sorrows of Love," he identifies her with the miseries her absence creates in him but calls them "dear" and "necessary". They are the "demanding muses" inspirations his art requires. On the other hand, in "If Only You Knew", a long meditation on her elusiveness, he plays with the notion that he controls her; that though she will not yield to him in the flesh, she does in the poem, as he says "through my will to possess your illusion".

The poems of the collection "Les Tenebres" (Darkness), published in 1927, the other collection inspired by Yvonne George, take place at midnight or in twilight or firelight, in the distant past or the mythical present where anything can happen, even the most astonishing adventures. In the keynote poem, "The Voice of Robert Desnos" the poet, though master of his poetic universe, is unable to attract the one thing he wants most: his love, who takes on many forms.

Yvonne George fell ill and died of tuberculosis in 1930.