Reading Apollinaire S Calligrammes

Reading Apollinaire's Calligrammes examines Guillaume Apollinaire's second major collection of poetry. Composed between 1913 and 1918, the nineteen poems examined here fall into two main groups: the experimental poetry and the war poetry. They also provide glimpses of the poet's personal history, from his affair with Louise de Coligny-Châtillon to his engagement to Madeleine Pagès and his marriage with Jacqueline Kolb. Each section examines all of the previous scholarship for the work in question, provides a detailed analysis, and, in many cases, offers a new interpretation. Each poem is subjected to a meticulous line-by-line analysis in the light of current knowledge.

A bilingual edition of one of Guillaume Apollinaire's most important volumes of poetry, with extensive commentary by the translators.

Reading Apollinaire's Calligrammes examines Guillaume Apollinaire's second major collection of poetry. Composed between 1913 and 1918, the nineteen poems examined here fall into two main groups: the experimental poetry and the war poetry. They also provide glimpses of the poet's personal history, from his affair with Louise de Coligny-Châtillon to his engagement to Madeleine Pagès and his marriage with Jacqueline Kolb. Each section examines all of the previous scholarship for the work in question, provides a detailed analysis, and, in many cases, offers a new interpretation. Each poem is subjected to a meticulous line-by-line analysis in the light of current knowledge.

Selections from the author's Calligrammes in English and French.

Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he—as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier—did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface.

Apollinaire's two great collections of poetry, Alcools and Calligrammes, made his reputation, and they include love poems as well as the war poetry for which he is best known. Apollinaire coined the word 'surrealism'. This book covers the full range of Apollinaire's career, and includes some of the poet's inventive pictorial calligrams. The introduction and notes explore his seminal role in the culture of the twentieth century.

Reviewing the previous scholarship for seventeen of the most important poems in Alcools, this book provides a detailed analysis of each work and includes a state-of-the-art survey of current Apollinaire criticism. Besides acquainting readers with the existing scholarship, the book considers all the interpretations that have been proposed and indicates profitable directions to pursue. Each poem is subjected to a rigorous, line-by-line analysis that engages in a succession of dialogues with previous critics. The studies themselves are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the “Rhénanes” in 1901-1902 and concluding with “Zone” in 1912. Although each chapter is basically conceived as an independent unit, readers are able to follow the evolution of Apollinaire’s aesthetics from his first mature creations through his subsequent experiments with fantastic, hermetic, visionary, and cubist poetry. At the same time, they witness Apollinaire’s personal evolution from his infatuation with Annie Playden through a period of deep depression, his love affair with Marie Laurencin, and the aftermath of that relationship.