32 Poetry for Students
colors and scents. “Cortège”presents one of the
utmost incoherent yet challenging visions in the
theme of the inverted flight of a bird and its effects
on the relativity of land, sky and light:
Oiseau tranquille au vol inverse oiseau
Qui nidifie en l’air
A la limite où brille déjà ma mémoire
Baisse ta deuxième paupière
Ni à cause du soleil ni à cause de la terre
Mais pour ce feu oblong dont l’intensité ira
s’augmentant
Au point qu’il deviendra un jour l’unique lumière
“Le Brasier,” “Le Voyageur,” “Vendémiaire,”
could be called experimental poems: attempts to
avoid ordinary descriptions of the world and to per-
sonalize and thus recreate the realities of fire, sun,
sky, sea, heights, depths and the elixirs of human
thirst. In “La Maison des morts” he goes as far as
to combine the two spheres of life and death, and
he allows his living and dead creatures to inter-
mingle and coexperience not abstract but very con-
crete sensations.
Calligrammes(1918) is a more striking exam-
ple of his inventive approach to writing. The leit-
motiv of this collection of poetry is the newness of
the world: new fires, new forms, new colors impa-
tient to be given reality. The wand which has
brought about the return of the “age of magic” is
the war. Although Apollinaire experienced the
tragedy and pathos of war first hand on the front
line of action, nonetheless his vigorous imagination
often accepted the challenge of new vistas revealed
by the inventions pertaining to the war, and he
partially at least overcame his emotional suscepti-
bility to the catastrophe. With a prophetic eye he
placed the marvels of war above its miseries.
Beyond the political conflict he discerned the
more fundamental quarrel between tradition and
invention:
Ne pleurez donc pas sur les horreurs de la guerre
Avant elle nous n’avions que la surface
De la terre et des mers
Après elle nous aurons les abîmes
Le sous-sol et l’espace aviatique
“Guerre”
He felt the science of war making him at once in-
visible and ubiquitous; he felt that time had ac-
quired a new flexibility which could make it vanish
and be restored. He sensed that man was ap-
proaching the exploration of the lower depths not
only of the physical world but also of his own
consciousness.
In Calligrammes,Apollinaire used juxtaposi-
tion and discarded symmetry and order much morethan in his previous works. These poems are cir-
cumstantial in the sense that their point of depar-
ture is a factual event or concrete detail of the color
of the times. But the submarine cables, the planes
fighting overhead, the bombs, the flares, the tele-
phone or the phonograph, each serves as an impe-
tus to new imagery surpassing its circumstantial
nature and announcing to Apollinaire the need to
alert and sharpen the senses.
When Apollinaire was criticized for the ob-
scurity of the symbols in his play, Les Mamelles de
Tirésias,he defended himself by stating that true
symbolism, like the Sibylline Oracles, lends itself
to many meanings, “to numerous interpretations
that sometimes contradict each other.” Cal-
ligrammesfearlessly illustrates this theory, thereby
setting a new relationship between the artist and his
audience: if the writer or painter is no longer to be
a mere interpreter of life but a creator, then his erst-
while role of interpreter will be transferred to the
reader or spectator, who loses his passive task of
absorbing and feeling the message of the artist and
assumes the more creative role of relating the sen-
sations of the artist to his own experiences and his
own faculties of imagination and association. Thus
the flexibility of the visions of the artist are set to
a perpetual motion of interpretations, which may in
themselves be a form of creative activity. This same
technique, called by the uninitiated the obscurity of
modern art forms, was to become the sine qua non
of the works of the dadaist and surrealist disciples
of Apollinaire.
Perhaps fifty years from now the greatest mark
left by Apollinaire on the current of ideas will be
the break he dared to make with the mal du siècle
attitude which, after having played the poetic
strings of melancholy in the nineteenth century, had
continued uninterrupted through the undetermined
inquiétudeand unease over the modern world’s ills
shared by the leading writers before and after the
First World War,—and which has been deemed by
many critics to be synonymous with profundity.
Apollinaire rose like a mountain above the dejec-
tion of his times. He felt that it was time to replace
“this pessimism more than a century old, ancient
enough for such a boring thing.” The fat, jovial,
buoyant cosmopolite had had his share of the per-
sonal disappointments of life and the tragedy of
war. In “La Jolie Rousse,” the last poem of Cal-
ligrammes,he sums himself up, not forgetting his
misfortunes:
Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu’un vivant
peut connaîtreAlways