Volume 24 33
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l’amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l’Artillerie et l’Infanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l’effroyable
lutte....But he has hope in the future with its challenges
and surprises. In the words of his friend Philippe
Soupault, who recalled Apollinaire’s character
some years after his death, he was “l’être le plus
heureux de vivre” and although sometimes sad, lan-
guorous and melancholy, yet never a “désespéré.”
Apollinaire had an unfailing faith in modern
man who, according to his prediction, would be
“plus pur, plus vif et plus savant.” He believed
more fervently perhaps than any writer of his gen-
eration in the future of art, and he announced in
one of his very last writings, Couleur du Temps,
that the resurrection of the poets was approaching.
At a time when despair would have been a more
natural note to strike on his lyre, he preferred to
give man confidence in himself:
Mais il y a si longtemps qu’on fait croire aux gens
Qu’ils n’ont aucun avenir qu’ils sont ignorants à
jamais
Et idiots de naissance
Qu’on en a pris son parti et que nul n’a même
l’idée
De se demander s’il connaît l’avenir ou non
“Sur les Prophéties,” Calligrammes
Having cultivated in himself the power of
prophecy he saw beyond the grimness of mecha-
nization, beyond the dumbness of uncontrolled in-
stincts, beyond the gruesomeness of war. He was not
afraid to use the word “progress” although he had
inklings that a more appropriate term for what he
wanted would be found perhaps in a hundred years.
Beyond mechanization was to be the new world of
enchanters, beyond uncontrolled instincts would be
the discovery of their secret motivations and possi-
bly the eventual improvement of man, beyond the
gruesomeness of war would be the letting down of
physical barriers, the broadening of the domains of
man in all directions. And through all these, what
primarily interested him was the possibility of new
subjects for the artists’ imagination: thousands of
new combinations which spell progress in art, as well
as in life. The hymn of the future would be “para-
disiac,” as he announces in his poem “La Nuit
d’Avril 1915,” and “victory” has for him a more
basic meaning than the cessation of hostilities:
La Victoire avant tout sera
De bien voir au loinDe tout voir
De près
Et que tout ait un nom nouveau
“La Victoire,” Calligrammes
Has Apollinaire’s optimism been an anachronism
so far in the intellectual history of the twentieth
century? Considering the utter pessimism of estab-
lished writers in most countries today, even in-
cluding some of the new post-war crop, one is
inclined to believe that Apollinaire’s tone of hope
and faith is alien to the general tenor of the times.
Yet many of his contemporaries and younger con-
frèreshad the conviction that he would exercise
great influence on art and literature. Philippe
Soupault called him a “signal flare” on the artistic
horizon and pointed out that Apollinaire subjected
his contemporaries to a sort of contagion: “It is...
thanks to him that poetry was revived.... All he
had to do was to write a poem and immediately
many poems would be born, publish a book like
Alcoolsand all of the poetry of his time found an
orientation.” André Breton, who according to
Soupault was one of the first to realize what a poet
Apollinaire was, grants him the credit of having
been the reinventer of poetry, in his article on Apol-
linaire in Les Pas Perdus;and he points to the psy-
chological truth revealed in the apparent disorder
of his writings, this disorder which through Breton
was to become a major characteristic of surrealism.
Awareness of Apollinaire’s role as a motivator of
ideas went beyond French boundaries. In his pref-
ace to Apollinaire’s Il y a,Ramón Gómez de la
Serna states that he was the poet who has suffered
the least degree of death in dying.
Today, observing what used to be the initially
despairing school of surrealists who borrowed so
much from Apollinaire’s technical concepts but re-
jected his tone of optimism, one notes that most of
the present and past members of the coterie have
undergone a change of outlook and in the midst of
the tragic social and political chaos of troubled Eu-
rope have adopted the note of fortified prophecy be-
queathed to them by their precursor. The war and
post-war poems of Breton, Aragon, Char and Elu-
ard abound in the same type of energetic optimism
and hope as in the vigorous poems of Apollinaire
written during the previous war. The enthusiasm
shown on the thirtieth anniversary of his death last
year, the number of memoirs appearing lately about
him, and “the great enthusiasm and fervent admi-
ration of Apollinaire which animates the youth of
today,” according to a letter of Madame Apollinaire
addressed to me last year, may be further indication
of increasing influence and even of a new trend.Always