Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire

First published:Alcools: Poèmes, 1898-1913, 1913 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Poetry

The Poem

The son of a Polish adventurer and an Italian officer, Guillaume Apollinaire spent most of his childhood in Monaco and the South of France. By 1899, when he was nineteen, he had come to Paris, where he became one of the most remarkable leaders of the young intellectual movements in the capital. In one way or another he contributed to Fauvism, to cubism, and even to Surrealism. He helped, moreover, to establish the reputation of the painter Henri Rousseau.

Apollinaire’s Alcools, a collection of poems published in 1913, contains works that span the years 1898 to 1913. There is little thematic or formal unity within this collection, and the title expresses the poet’s thirst for vivid sensation and experience as well as his remarkable impressionability.

The rather long poem “Zone” was not Apollinaire’s original selection as the first in the 1913 collection. Its themes and aesthetic are scarcely characteristic, but perhaps an explanation may be sought in the very element of surprise, which is an essential part of Apollinaire’s poetic technique.

“Zone” and several other pieces in Alcools may justifiably be compared with cubist paintings by artists such as Robert Delaunay. There is the same prismatic view of the world, the juxtaposition of apparently disparate elements, and the attempt to offer several views from different angles simultaneously. A contrapuntal or polyphonic effect in “Zone,” as in other pieces, is furthered by Apollinaire’s complete suppression of punctuation from the collection. This effect introduces a constant element of ambiguity and necessitates a careful reading, and often a rereading, which helps to immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the poem. Apollinaire, when he uses punctuation, shows himself to have a faulty knowledge of it; he was later to become skilled in not using it. The reader has the impression of helping to re-create the poem when he or she reads it.

The opening lines of “Zone” situate its mood, if not its true time or location. The poem is ostensibly a lament for excessive devotion to the past, and Apollinaire’s introduction of the Eiffel Tower, automobiles, and precise, proper names is pointedly topical. There is, however, a much deeper theme and unity in the form of the poet’s quest. Unhappy in love, he searches in vain for some consolation. The mood remains nostalgic, even unhappy. Walking through Paris, the poet has the impression that he is cast in the role of unhappy lover, and this unhappiness develops into a pattern, a consciousness of a life lived in frenzy and waste. With a technique similar to that of the flashback in the cinema, the language dissolves into a series of images as the poet reviews the places he visited. Viewing himself as object, then speaking as the subject of the description, passing from second to first person, then combining the two, the poet achieves a remarkable fusion of past and present, the overall effect of which is a sense of complete failure.

Apollinaire’s influence on the later Surrealist movement cannot be doubted. “Zone,” like many other pieces, suggests the presence of beauty and poetry as a latent quality in the most unconventional objects. Street scenes in Paris with cafés and streetcars, the Eiffel Tower, police thrillers: These are a few of the manifestations of the French scene in Apollinaire’s day around which he shaped his poetry.

The Surrealist poet André Breton was later to assert that poetry is contained within objects that up to his time had been held to be alien to art. Apollinaire would have agreed. He does not hesitate to intersperse snatches of conversation with a nostalgic lament or part of a popular song. In at least one poem, “The Pretty Redhead,” Apollinaire’s stated ambition is no less enormous than that of Breton and indeed could easily find a place inside one of the Surrealist manifestos.

It would be quite wrong to cast Apollinaire simply as a poet-explorer or a virtuoso playing with words. Many critics would even claim that his essential talent is lyrical, and it is true that there is a peculiar poignancy about his laments for love lost or for the passage of time, two of the permanent subjects of poetry.

In “Mirabeau Bridge,” Apollinaire offers the reader the simplest of situations: a bridge over the Seine, with someone looking into the water. Though the external description is slight, almost everything in the poem suggests movement, and the flow of the river evokes the moods of love and of the passing of time. When the poet tries to establish a parallel between the bridge and the lovers, to suggest a possible permanence in love, the attempt fails. Love is shown to disappear, like the waters of the river.

The third piece in Alcools is a long poem in several movements entitled “The Song of the Ill-Beloved.” In it Apollinaire displays his ready acceptance of the world and his openness and receptiveness to it, as well as his vulnerability. The poem is often ambiguous. It has love as its theme, but love made noticeable through its absence and the poet’s memory of it rather than through any form of fulfillment. The opening stanza prepares the reader for the mysterious, unreal atmosphere of the poem, similar to that conjured up in the thrillers of the period. In the image of a young hoodlum appearing in the fog of a London evening Apollinaire creates an aura of mystery that makes anything seem possible. He communicates a sense of immediacy, so that each description comes vividly to life. For each mood, each idea, the poet immediately offers an image. A memory is no sooner called up than it fills the poem, temporarily changing its direction. There is, however, a single thread running through the poem, a strain of melancholy involving a return to present reality from memories of springtime and love. The final stanza reasserts the poet’s awareness of his role as the one who captures memories and sings them, who makes of his experience a pattern, a ritual, a song that can be passed on to others.

Better, perhaps, than any other poet in the early twentieth century, Apollinaire is able to translate the eclectic, anxious consciousness of his time, which combines the awareness of tradition and the desire for change. In Apollinaire, the Romantics’ rediscovery of the dual nature of human beings—angel and beast, body and soul, the homo duplex of Christian terminology—gives way to a more complex concept. Apollinaire reveals the homo multiplex, the human beings of manifold aspirations and moods that often coexist simultaneously. The apparent disorder of this consciousness is reflected in the poems.

Bibliography

Bates, Scott. Guillaume Apollinaire. New York: Twayne, 1967. A detailed, exhaustive study of Apollinaire’s poetic art, tracing characteristic themes and sources.

Cornelius, Nathalie Goodisman. A Semiotic Analysis of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Mythology in “Alcools.” New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Cornelius closely analyzes several of the poems, using semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols, to discover a structure for the seemingly random use of allusions, myths, and neologisms.

Davies, Margaret. Apollinaire. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964. A well-grounded life-and-works study in the British tradition, rich in documented anecdote if somewhat short on literary analysis. Davies examines in detail the “riddle” of Apollinaire’s paternity, a major theme in his literary art.

Saul, Scott. “A Zone Is a Zone Is a Zone: The Repeated Unsettlement of Guillaume Apollinaire.” In Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium, edited and coauthored by Stamos Metzidakes. 2d ed. Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 2001. This analysis of Apollinaire’s work is included in a collection of essays that examine French poetry from the Middle Ages to the present in order to determine why French verse has been overshadowed by artistic and critical prose.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. A pioneering work of cultural history. Although trained as a scholar of literature, Shattuck ranges freely and knowledgeably across disciplinary boundaries in search of the modernist spirit and its origins, concentrating on the figures of Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Apollinaire, and Erik Satie. Treats both Apollinaire’s poetry and his role as critic and publicist of modern art.

Stamelman, Richard Howard. The Drama of Self in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Alcools.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1976. Offers insightful commentary and criticism in clear, often memorable prose.

Steegmuller, Francis. Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963. Written by one of the best-known and most effective English-language translators of Apollinaire, Steegmuller’s volume complements Shattuck’s discussion of Apollinaire as poet and art critic. Also provides a useful re-creation of artistic life in turn-of-the-century Paris.