After his father's death when he was six years old, his mother joined relatives in Metz, then a major town of Lorraine in the 1871 German Empire (after 1918 the area was claimed by France).

At the outbreak of World War I he escaped to Switzerland to avoid conscription, and became friends with the dadaists of Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire, in particular Hans Arp, but also Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia.

It was in Paris that his Expressionist style began to develop towards Surrealism, as witnessed in drama and film scenarios he wrote there, such as Die Chapliniade (The Chaplinade) and Mathusalem (Methusalem).

These works blend fantasy, reality, and the absurd, continuing and extending the Expressionist program of arousing audience response by means of shock effects.

While in Paris he also worked as a translator into German (Blaise Cendrars and Ulysses, among others) and into French, adapting Georg Kaiser's Fire at the Opera (Der Brand im Opernhaus, 1919) for Théâtre de l'Œuvre.

In 1936, he published an epic poem entitled La chanson de Jean Sans Terre (the song of John, King of England), with illustrations contributed by Marc Chagall.

Between 1943 and 1946, Goll edited the French-American poetry magazine Hémispheres[3] with works by Saint-John Perse, Césaire, Breton ... and young American poets.

In 1945, the year he was diagnosed with leukemia, he wrote Atom Elegy and other death-haunted poems collected in the English language volume Fruit From Saturn (1946).