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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry fills the twenty-year interregnum between the end of Symbolism as an organized movement and the birth of Surrealism. The earliest selections in Alcools were composed the year of Mallarmé's death in 1898, and Calligrammes appeared only a few months before Breton and Soupault began their collaboration on Les Champs magnétiques in 1919. The work of perhaps no other poet in France at the turn of the century flows in such a direct current between the two dominant schools of the last seventy-five years. Obviously our appreciation of this period would gain considerably could we but view the poems of Apollinaire in the order in which he created them, proceeding with him from the mellifluous, fin de siècle delicacy of his first published piece, Clair de lune, to the discordant lines of Victoire:
1 Paris: Mercure de France, 1913. My references are to the N.R.F. edition, copyright by Gallimard, 1920.
2 It is possible that Apollinaire wanted not only to conceal the autobiographical nature of his poems but also to arrange them according to length and prosody. The longer pieces are almost invariably offset by brief ones. Similarly, there is a pattern of alternation between alexandrines and octosyllabics. It is noteworthy that when Apollinaire decided to place Zone at the head of the volume instead of La Chanson du Mal-Aimé he thereupon placed the short piece Le Pont Mirabeau in between the two longer works. (Cf. the first set of corrected proofs of Alcools, property of M. Tristan Tzara.) At the moment that Apollinaire was assembling Alcools he was also preparing an essay on the cubist painters which contains the following observation: “tout est sacrifié par l'artiste à la composition de son tableau. Le sujet ne compte plus, ou, s'il compte c'est à peine” (Les Soirées de Paris, Feb. 1912).
3 The Jacques Doucet collection in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, contains 17 MSS. of selections in Alcools. Both M. Marcel Adéma, who has been collecting MSS of the poet over the last decade and a half, and Mme Jacqueline Apollinaire have confessed to me their ignorance of the whereabouts of any others in Alcools, if indeed they do exist.
4 Letter to Henri Martineau published by André Rouveyre in “La Poésie d'Apollinaire protégée par lui-même,” Le Divan (March 1938), pp. 65-67.
5 Apollinaire began to correct the proofs on 31 Oct. 1912, according to the date stamped on the set belonging to M. Tristan Tzara.
6 Printed for the first time in A. Toussaint-Luca, Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Ed. de la Phalange, 1920), p. 32.
7 See Marcel Adéma, “Guillaume Apollinaire,” France-Asie (Dec. 1948), pp. 361-362.
8 Compare:
and:
9 The first version reads as follows:
10 The first version reads as follows:
11 Les Onze mille verges (s.l., s.d.), p. 142.
12 Le Festin d'Esope, reprinted in L/Hérésiarque et Cie (Paris: Stock, 1910).
13 MS. 7213/22, Jacques Doucet collection.
14 Cf.:
and:
15 The heresy in question, the belief that the two thieves to the right and left of Christ on the cross were the other two members of the Trinity, is also suggested in the Christian symbolism of Le Larron, specifically stanzas 22, 24, 25, and 31.
16 See Ernst Wolf, Apollinaire und das Rheinland (Inaug. Diss., Bonn, 1937), p. 157.
17 See Wolf., p. 50.
18 See ibid., p. 64.
19 Both La Loreley and Mai were presumably composed as Apollinaire came down the Rhine on his return to Neu-Glück and Oberpleis in May of 1902.
20 Letter of 30 July 1915, quoted by E. Wolf, pp. 80-81.
21 MSS. 7213/11 and 7213/19 resp. of the Jacques Doucet collection.
22 Miss Playden recalls having left England within “ten days” after Apollinaire's visit to London in May 1904 (interview with Miss Annie Playden in New York, 27 Oct. 1951).
23 See Jean Mollet, “Les Origines du cubisme: Apollinaire, Picasso et Cie,” Les Lettres françaises (3 Jan. 1947).
24 Compare:
and:
25 Cf. esp. the line, “Va. L'histrion tire la langue aux attentives” (Le Mendiant), and “Vois l'histrion tire la langue aux attentives” (Un Soir).
26 Note the resemblance of: (1) “Les mains des amants d'antan jonchent ton sol” (Signe) to “L'automne est plein de mains coupées / Non non ce sont des feuilles mortes” (Rhénane d'automne); (2) “Une épouse me suit, c'est mon ombre fatale” (Signe) to “Ténébreuse épouse que j'aime / Tu es à moi en n'étant rien / O mon ombre en deuil de moi-même” (La Chanson du Mal-Aimé); and (3) “Les colombes ce soir prennent leur dernier vol” (Signe) to “Les obscures migrations des oiseaux blancs” (Le Mendiant).
27 Miss Playden sent explicit instructions to her family that her address in America was not to be divulged to him (interview of 27 Oct. 1951).
28 See E. Wolf, p. 6.
29 MS. 7213/17 in the Jacques Doucet collection. Vers et Prose was founded in March 1905.
30 Interview with Louis de Gonzague Frick, in Paris, 31 May 1951.
31 See Jean Metzinger, “Un souper chez Guillaume Apollinaire,” Guillaume Apollinaire (Albi: Editions de la Tête Noire, 1946), pp. 67-69.
32 Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (Paris: Ed. de la Sirène, 1919), no pagination.
55 Fleuret, La Boîte à Perruque (Paris: Les Ecrivains associés, 1935), p. 90.
34 Catalogue No. 257, 15 May 1935, of the librairie Georges Andrieux, 154 Blvd. Malesherbes, Paris, lists a letter (No. 877) addressed to Jean Mollet from Apollinaire, dated “Nîmes, 22.3.15,” and enclosing “seize très beaux vers sur petite feuille de papier pelure dans leur tout premier état: raturé, surchargé.” The catalogue quotes the following lines only:
The 16 lines are presumably the 4 alexandrine quatrains which form a unit in the midst of the vers libres of Le Voyageur.
35 Interview with André Salmon in Paris, 30 April 1951.
36 Letter of 30 July 1915.
37 Quoted by Francis Ambrière, “Quatre ébauches d'Apollinaire,” Mercure de France (15 Feb. 1934), pp. 183-187.
38 Letter of 30 July 1915.
39 Idem.
40 See unpublished letter dated 1934, in the hands of M. Marcel Adéma.
41 “Le Matin avait ouvert un concours aux poètes. Il s'agissait de faire une pièce de vers sur l'aviation. Apollinaire avait envoyé deux cent vers en bons alexandrins et rimes plates, qu'il nous lut un soir, chez lui rue Gros à Auteuil et qui étaient d'ailleurs un chef d'ceuvre. Mais ce fut René Fauchois qui obtint le prix. A trois ans de là, lorsque parut son volume ‘Alcove’ [sic] je retrouvai le poème de notre ami, mais bien changé. Je lui en fis la remarque. ‘Que voulez-vous, me dit Apollinaire, pour le principe j'ai chambardé mon poème!’ Il l'avait mis en vers libres, disloquant ses purs alexandrins!”—“Guillaume Apollinaire—ou l'Imposteur magnanime,” Mercure de Flandre (Nov. 1927), pp. 17-21. It is possible that Bonmariage is confusing Zone with a poem in alexandrines entitled L'Avion dating from 1910, and published for the first time in Guillaume Apollinaire, Poètes d'aujourd'hui, No. 8 (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1947), pp. 46-47.
42 See Louis Aragon, “La Rime en 1940,” Poètes Casqués, No. 3 (1940), pp. 34-35.
43 “Picasso Speaks,” The Arts, New York (May 1923), pp. 15-26.