Customer Reviews

Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire (New Directions Books)

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Although I'm not sure it'll be of interest to anyone other than myself,Guillaume Apollinaire was the poet/lit.critic who first jump-started my interest in Surrealism and French writing. If you have any interest in the above, or in world poetry in general, Apollinaire's writing is indispensible. For not only did he play an influential role in founding several important artistic and literary movements of the twentieth century (surrealism, dadaism, automatic writing and cubism)he was a talented poet whose writing, though difficult at times, is highly lyrical and more than worth reading.

It is unfortunate that we must at times label our giants with little tags and thus diminish their true presence. In the case of Apollinaire, the surrealist label is presumably warranted, as the man seemed content enough with the definition. But to emphasize the surreal too much in Apollinaire's poetry is to look for the Paris cafe crowd with bizarre hats, and miss out on the melancholy wisdom of the soldier. Processions, oh, processions... Century, oh, century of clouds... Finally lies frighten me no more... My years an oh my pretty girls... All this and much more rendered in verses that follow rhyme and rhythmic structures not much more adventurous than those of the Victorians themselves.

I have not read this entire volume, so my comments are of limited value, but the categorization of Apollinaire as a surrealist in the two other reviews is misleading. Apollinaire coined the term "surreal" in 1917 to describe "Parade," a ballet on which Satie, Diaghilev, Massine, Picasso, and Cocteau collaborated. Apollinaire died the next year, and surrealism did not take programmatic form until Andre Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Apollinaire's association with cubism was more long-lasting and significant: he was one of Picasso's closest friends and among the most significant critical champions of cubism.

But enough talk of "isms": what matters is Apollinaire's lyric gift, which subverted traditional values with irony that still conveys the enthusiasm for the modern that accompanied the great scientific, technological, and cultural ferment that Europe experienced in the years before WWI.