A French poet of Swiss origin born in La Chaux-de-Fonds (under the name of Frédéric-Louis Sauser), close to Neuchâtel, and who died in Paris. Throughout his life he never stopped travelling. And from these multiple voyages throughout the world he gathered a continuous sum of memories, transfigured by the magic of a writing which broke decisively with classical poetry by its dynamic spontaneity and whose edginess in particular eschews punctuation. La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), a long railway centred poem which recounts a voyage in Manchuria, is his strongest work. But this adventurous existence, over the course of which this tireless surveyor lost a forearm (in the Foreign Legion, in 1915), would bring forth many others: the novel L'Or (1925) for example, as well as Bourlinguer (1948) (Sailing the Seven Seas), an autobiographical tale with an evocative title. Heteregenous images and notes seized on the wing jostle with each other in his works, which more than ever before usher modern life into French poetry.