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24 - Apollinaire: impresario of the new

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2015

Brian Nelson
Brian Nelson
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria
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Summary

…fed up with this ancient world

– Apollinaire, ‘Zone’

If Alfred Jarry was the agent provocateur of the avant-garde, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was, in the words of Roger Shattuck, its impresario. Both in his own work and in his indefatigable activities as critic and propagandist, he championed everything that was new and challenging in the arts in the early twentieth century. His was the most influential new voice in poetry when it was bursting out of old forms and themes to discover what Baudelaire had proclaimed years earlier as the ‘heroism of modern life’. His two major collections of poetry are Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918).

Tradition and modernity

‘What has our culture lost … that the avant-garde had in 1890?’ asks Robert Hughes in the opening chapter of his book The Shock of the New. He answers: ‘Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.’ The great metaphor of this sense of change – ‘its master-image, the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together’ – was, Hughes suggests, the Eiffel Tower. The Tower was built to serve as the central icon of the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair), the theme of which was industrial manufacture and transformation. The speed at which culture reinvented itself through technology from around 1880 to the outbreak of the First World War was astonishing. Inventions and discoveries included the automobile, the aeroplane, the telephone, the wireless, the phonograph, the telegraph, the light-bulb, the cinematograph, the gramophone disc, wireless telegraphy, radium and radiography.

[What emerged from] the growth of scientific and technical discovery … was the sense of an accelerated rate of change in all areas of human discourse, including art. From now on the rules would quaver, the fixed canons of knowledge fail, under the pressure of new experience and the demand for new forms to contain it.[…]

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature , pp. 178 - 182
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Breunig, LeRoy C., Guillaume Apollinaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Davies, Margaret, Apollinaire (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964).Google Scholar
Kelley, David, ‘Defeat and Rebirth: The City Poetry of Apollinaire’, in Timms, Edward and Kelley, David (eds.), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 80–96.Google Scholar
Little, Roger, Guillaume Apollinaire (London: Athlone Press, 1976).Google Scholar
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Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War 1 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). (‘Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880–1918’, pp. 253–322.) An expanded and revised version of a volume originally published in 1955.Google Scholar
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Alcools, ed. Pilkington, A. E. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970; London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993).Google Scholar
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Apollinaire, Guillaume, Alcools, ed. Pilkington, A. E. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970; London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, ed. Breunig, LeRoy C. with a new foreword by Shattuck, Roger, trans. Suleiman, Susan (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001).Google Scholar
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916), trans. Greet, Anne Hyde, with an intro. by Lockerbie, S. I. and commentary by Greet, Anne Hyde and Lockerbie, S. I. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar
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Apollinaire, Guillaume, Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. with a critical intro. by Shattuck, Roger (New York: New Directions, 1971).Google Scholar

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