As the title indicates, the series of poems published in Calligrammes was written over several years, but the volume was not published until after the author’s death. As one of France’s avant-garde writers, Apollinaire experimented with new forms of expression, and his deliberate visual arrangement of words on the page in Calligrammes uses images to convey an immediate impact extended through, and frequently complicated by, the words themselves.
The title, a combination of calligraphy and pictogram and meaning “picture writing,” illustrates what Apollinaire forced his reader to do in some of the poems: recombine the fragmented structure and language of poems to achieve a unified understanding.
Deemed by many critics as Apollinaire’s most significant work, the collection is divided into six sections: Waves, Banners, Flutchel, Flash of Gunfire, Moon-Colored Shells, and The Starry Head. Apollinaire’s subjects in Calligrammes range from the novel to the traditional. Ideas such as the effects of technology on modern life had not been treated extensively in avant-garde poetry. However, even when Apollinaire chose more conventional subjects such as love or war, he regarded them with a fresh perspective.
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The poem “Lettre-Ocean” from the first section, Waves, presents a global vision of modern culture through a series of radiating lines and disjointed phrases. Instead of one linear progression through the poem, readers must follow numerous pathways. Yet the poems placed immediately following this disorderly view of life are coherent and arranged in shapes that are immediately identifiable.
These simple shapes do not mean that the poems are simple and can be comprehended through the visual experience alone. The initial visual recognition leads to an examination of the poet’s contemplation of the idea, then to a return to the image with new understanding. Arrangements such as this suggest the attempts by Apollinaire and other modernists to find graphic means of reconciliation between the order and disorder of the world.
The collection’s fourth section, Flash of Gunfire, deals not so much with war as with love and sexual desire. The speaker in “In the Dugout” directly addresses his love and creates an illusory idyllic landscape. Amid this landscape his “soul that’s hollow and empty” is nevertheless crowded with “ugly beings that hurt / me” and recognizes both the reality of war and the ephemeral nature of love.
With this collection Apollinaire challenges the traditional boundaries of poetry with new forms of expression and avant-garde concepts. The ordeals facing the modern individual must be met with confidence and vision and with a willingness to reach across borders to establish new understandings. This is the task Apollinaire sets for himself and for his readers in Calligrammes.
Bibliography
Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916). Translated by Anne Hyde Greet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, 2004.
Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature
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