Alcools

Alcools is the major poetry collection by Guillaume Apollinaire, first published in 1913. Apollinaire, born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, lived from 1880 to 1918 and was the central figure in the early French avant garde that produced Cubist painting, Surrealist poetry, and the broader modernist break with nineteenth century European literary tradition.

Alcools collects poems Apollinaire had been writing across the previous fifteen years. The famous decision to print the entire book without punctuation, made just before it went to press, transformed how readers had to take the poems. Sentences run into each other. Images crash together. The reader has to do the work of finding the breaks. The effect is part of why the collection felt so new when it appeared and why it still reads as one of the founding documents of European literary modernism.

The individual poems range across what would become the central modernist subjects. Zone, the long opening poem, walks through Paris at dawn and folds modern urban experience together with classical mythology and Christian iconography in a way that anticipates the techniques Eliot would use in The Waste Land nine years later. Le Pont Mirabeau is the quiet love poem that almost every educated French speaker still knows by heart. Marie, La Loreley, Vendémiaire, and the other middle length poems work through the same combination of personal feeling and modernist technique.

Apollinaire’s life was as compressed as his poetry. He moved through Paris just before the First World War in the company of Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and the various other figures who were inventing what we now call European modernism. He volunteered for French military service in 1914, was seriously wounded in the head in 1916, and died of the influenza pandemic in 1918 at thirty eight.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is best read in French if you can manage it. The English translations, by Donald Revell and others, give a reasonable sense of the originals. Alcools pairs naturally with Calligrammes, his second major collection, and with the broader French modernist canon.