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Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) is one of the greatest and most influential figures in modern French poetry. He founded the journal Nord-Sud with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, which drew together the first Surrealists. Associated with painters such as Picasso, Gris and Braque, he has been called a Cubist poet, for conventional structure is eliminated in his poesie brut (`raw poetry'), much as the painters cut away surface appearance to bring through the underlying forms. But Reverdy went beyond Cubist desolation to express a profound spiritual doubt and his sense of a mystery in the universe forever beyond his understanding. Andre Breton hailed him in the first Surrealist Manifesto as `the greatest poet of the time'. Louis Aragon said that for Breton, Soupault, Eluard and himself, Reverdy was `our immediate elder, the exemplary poet'.