Guillaume Apollinaire — Poet

A Portrait

“…poetry is a power to transform even the dullest activities of the mind.”

Apollinaire, the Cubist at rest. Image: Mondayoumardi

Under the Pont Mirabeau the Seine

Flows with our loves

Must I recall again?

Joy always used to follow after pain…

Penguin’s 1965 Apollinaire: Selected Poems (one of their Modern European Poets series) is a strange mixed bag that at times seems charmingly old fashioned, yet at others is wonderfully modern, in the way Walt Whitman’s work must have felt in the 1850s. But it’s nothing like Edward Thomas’s output (a poet who was a contemporary of Apollinaire), feeling at times more like early Robert Frost, a poet Apollinaire would have been aware of; but there’s something else going on. And it was only when I read the blurb on the back cover (I was about half way through the book) did I begin to understand what that was:

“ Guillaume Apollinaire was a friend and supporter of the Cubists. His own experimental poetic forms employ rhythms which dispense with punctuation and a style of typography derived from exercises on postcards sent from the front in the First World War. Yet he is also in France the last of the poets whose lines young people know by heart…”