Poetry for Students

30 Poetry for Students

Que la petite auto nous avait conduits dans une

époque

Nouvelle

Et bien qu’étant déjà tous deux des hommes mûrs

Nous venions cependant de naître.

Calligrammes

Why not a parallel between the creativeness of ap-

plied science and that of the arts? In his preface to

Les Mamelles de Tirésiashe fabricated the word

“surreal” to designate the human ability to create

the unnatural, and he pointed out that man’s first

surrealistic act was the creation of the wheel,

which imitates the physical function of motion but

creates a form entirely independent of natural en-

tities; the wheel becomes for him a product of

purely creative work on the part of man, a mani-

festation of unconscious surrealism. Now the

magic of the telephone, the automobile, the elec-

tric bulb, the airplane,—creations in the same

sense as the wheel—disproved even to a further

degree the well accepted adage that there is noth-

ing new under the sun. The same independence

from natural objects, which the technologist had

achieved by his inventions, and through which he

revolutionized the physical appearance of the

world, should be sought by the artist in the intel-

lectual realm. To Apollinaire the acquisition of that

freedom was to be the fundamental attainment of

the modern mind.

One could be a poet in many fields, and the

technologist had proved for the moment to be a

“poet” in a truer sense than the artist, admits Apol-

linaire in “L’Esprit moderne”:

Poetry and creation are one and the same thing; he

alone must be called poet who invents and creates,

as much as it is given to man to create.... One can

be a poet in all fields: all that is needed is to be ad-

venturous, to be after discoveries.

In retrospect it occurred to him that the poet had

until recently been the precursor of the scientific

inventor. Had he not conceived of the airplane cen-

turies before the technologist was able to material-

ize his legend of Icarus? But Apollinaire accepted

the fact that for once the scientist had stepped ahead

of the artist in the realm of magic, and he took the

attitude that since the scientist had become not a

destroyer of fantasy but a producer of marvels, his

inventiveness should prove a challenge and an in-

centive to the artist:

The wonders impose on us the duty of not letting

imagination and poetic subtleties lag behind those of

the artisans who improve the machine. Already sci-

entific terminology is in deep discord with that of the

poets. This is an unbearable state of affairs.

“L’Esprit moderne”

Art’s pitfall in recent times had been its imitative

approach to nature. Apollinaire waged war against

photography, which to him was in all its technical

perfection what smoke is to fire. He made photog-

raphy the symbol of imitation and the antithesis of

art. Some years later Louis Aragon was to repeat

Apollinaire’s words against photography even

more vehemently in defining his concept of the re-

lation between reality and art. Since reality, ac-

cording to Apollinaire, was dependent not on

physical nature but on the mind’s creativeness, all

the arts had the same basic revolution to promote:

that of creating rather than representing the object.

The symbolists had had a similar notion about

the “interiority” of art but they had feared the ob-

ject, feared the concrete,which to them had been

synonymous with the natural.With this difference

of attitude in mind Apollinaire had made up the

word “surreal” as opposed to the word “symbol-

ist.” In his judgment art had to be terribly concrete

albeit unnatural. He looked for this twofold qual-

ity in the works of his contemporaries, signaled it

in the poetry of André Salmon, his companion pil-

grim of perdition.

Although Apollinaire showed a certain affin-

ity at first with Marinetti and Company, he soon

noticed something superficial in the way the futur-

ists extolled science. They were confusing speed

with progress. It was the object of scientific cre-

ation which interested them rather than the process

of creation. Marinetti’s attitude toward science is a

far cry from Apollinaire’s. When in an unfriendly

apostrophe to the moon the futurist praises the elec-

tric bulb and belittles the light of the moon, he is

led to no adventures of the imagination by the stim-

ulus of the newly created object of science but

merely expresses a journalistic appreciation of

technological progress. In much the same manner,

in his The Pope’s Monoplanethe airplane is ad-

mired as a means of escape and not as an impetus

to broader artistic visions.

Apollinaire’s relations with the cubist painters

were of a much more fundamental nature. He found

in the cubists the truest competitors of the imagi-

native technologists. As the perfect illustration of

his own theories he defined cubism in Les Peintres

cubistes (1913) as “an art of conception which

tends to rise to the level of creation.” In looking

back on traditional painting he found too many

painters who worshipped plants, stones, water and

men. Without being iconoclastic,—as some of his

followers were to become—he warned the artist not

to be too much attached to the dead. He foretold

before José Ortega y Gasset a dehumanization in

Always