xxxvi
introduction
The general temper of the French modernist poet is tinged with the
kind of visionary exaltation and despair of nineteenth-century romantic
revolution against the easy clichés of comfortable bourgeois thought (the
‘‘seated,’’ as Arthur Rimbaud called them). Rimbaud’s troubled and trou-
bling perception of the split in poetic personality—‘‘je est un autre’’ (‘‘I is
another’’), famously expressed in his letter of May 13, 1871, to Georges
Izambard— has never ceased to echo in modern poetry. One of the ele-
ments di√erentiating French and British poetry of the socially concerned
sort is an ingrained and seemingly invincible French idealism. As Edward
Lucie-Smith and Simon Watson Taylor describe French poetry: ‘‘It has a
moral force allied with enduring social (and often revolutionary) aspira-
tions which have preserved it both from the narrow parochialism which
has been the besetting sin of English poetry since the war, and from the
naievety and sentimentality which have often characterized American
poetry in its more determinedly experimental moments.’’∞Ω
In the minds of many poets of the early twentieth century, poetry and
travel seem to have been closely linked. Consider, for example, Apolli-
naire’s celebrated poem ‘‘Zone’’ (1912), which possesses much of the same
heightened aura of nostalgia cast by the Symbolists—a feeling that calls to
mind those often closed eyes of Redon’s faces or the finger on the lips to
signal ‘‘silence’’—but in a joyous combination with the discoveries of an
ongoing, open-eyed adventurer-poet. Instead of the silencing of speech,
the poet now shouts, reads newspapers aloud, zips about here and there,
first across Paris, then across the Continent, the Orient, and the world of
myth, celebrating celestial apparitions made modern, like Christ the avia-
tor, and Oceanic figures. When Blaise Cendrars read aloud his unpunctu-
ated and emotionally powerful ‘‘Les Pâques à New York’’ (Easter in New
York) at a gathering in Paris, Apollinaire—who was among the listeners—
is said to have been inspired to march home and remove the punctuation
from his own long poem ‘‘Zone.’’ Cendrars’ own trans-European travels
were set forth in his amazingly forward-looking ‘‘La Prose du Trans-
sibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France’’ (1913). The work was marked
‘‘Prose,’’ he said, as a modest equivalent of poetry. The voyage of this
‘‘prose’’ of the Trans-Siberian railway is all the richer for Cendrars’ travel-
ing companion, a naïve prostitute named ‘‘little Jeanne,’’ who o√ers this
touching refrain as the two travel through distant lands: ‘‘Say, Blaise, are
we really a long way from Montmartre?’’ When, finally, the travelers do
return to Paris and the Ei√el Tower, the reader may reflect that the poem
is indeed a homegrown product of the experimental poetic tornado of
Paris (and therefore never a long way from Montmartre after all). The
year 1913 was certainly an annus mirabilis in many domains. Proust, Gide,
and Valéry were producing the masterpieces we know, and Apollinaire
was busy with the publication of Alcools.