part 1. 1897–1915: symbolism, post-symbolism, cubism, simultanism
whose length is based on the rhythm of the human breath. Claudel inter-
weaves prose and poetry in his longer poems (and in his poetic plays), all
of which are unmistakably lofty in style and conception. On the other
hand, no one could fail to recognize the powerful simplicity that charac-
terizes his prose poetry in Connaissance de l’Est (The East I Know). These
last brief poems, written when Claudel was the French ambassador to
China, remain striking examples of the prose poem: they are unforget-
table, inimitable.
Another extraordinary adventurer into China in the early part of the
century was Victor Segalen, doctor, essayist, and poet. The hieratic prose
poems collected in Stèles (Stelae) are a haunting presence, at once exotic
and strangely familiar. As one commentator has noted, ‘‘Epigraph and
carved stone, the stele stands there, body and soul, a complete being...
this hard composition, this density, this internal equilibrium and these
angles.... Thence the challenge to whomever would have them say what
it is they keep. They scorn to be read.... They do not express; they signify;
they are.’’∞ These verbal monuments are not only the records of an eccen-
tric and brilliant traveler to the East but a document of the French expan-
sion of vision in the twentieth century, to China and beyond. The genre of
the stela is unique unto itself, celebrating life, death, and the ongoing
construction and duration of poetic monuments.
No twentieth-century French poet is more beloved than the im-
mensely appealing Guillaume Apollinaire. As someone once remarked to
me, Apollinaire, almost alone among poets, has left a legacy of conge-
niality, not only in his time but in ours. Learned ‘‘Apollinaire specialists’’
from around the world collectively celebrate the poet who died of a
shrapnel wound just as World War I was ending. (‘‘A bas Guillaume,’’
people shouted in the streets; they, of course, meant the emperor, not
Apollinaire.) An elegy to him by Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dada
movement, is an unforgettable lament. In Apollinaire’s work on the Cub-
ist poets and painters, such as Pablo Picasso, he created an atmosphere
conducive to poetic thought and visuality and to the forms of modernism
saluted in his epic ‘‘Zone,’’ at once nostalgic and forward-looking, com-
bining the cosmic and the local, the airplane and the newspaper.
Blaise Cendrars—whose adopted name suggests the embers (la braise)
and ashes (les cendres) of inner conflagration, of self-immolation, as only
the first step toward re-creation of the self—is a poet of tremendous
influence whose contagious enthusiasm endures. Above all else, Cendrars
was fascinated with the multiform elements of the modern: ‘‘Profound
today,’’ the title of one of his essays, might sum up his poetic achievement.
His passion for real and imagined travel (‘‘Prose du Transsibérien et de la
petite Jeanne de France,’’ this long, superb travel poem called ‘‘Prosa,’’