Reading Apollinaire's Calligrammes

Willard Bohn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology (2017), The Avant-Garde Imperative (2013), Marvelous Encounters: Surrealist Responses to Film, Art, Poetry and Architecture (2003), Italian Futurist Poetry (2005), The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry (1993), and The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (1993).

Willard Bohn has produced a monumental work of exegesis. This volume, a close study of nineteen key poems in chronological order, elucidates in a line-by-line analysis the complexities and nuances of these poems. Drawing on his vast erudition, Willard Bohn, a leading American scholar of Apollinaire’s life and artistic career, coordinates, integrates and maps—without scholarly jargon—all the previous studies of Calligrammes within a larger panoramic vision of the artist, his world and modernist vision. Bohn’s readings provide a “cutting edge” understanding of Apollinaire’s poetic accomplishment, his poetic innovations, visual poetry, collage poems, use of simultaneity and cubistic perspectives, indeterminacy and desired ambiguity. Bohn restores Apollinaire’s major and final masterpiece, Calligrammes, to its rightful place as a key document in the history of Western poetry of the twentieth century and still affecting us today in the postmodern era.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Revolution and Renewal2. Simultaneous Exercises 3. Miraculous Encounters4. Visual Poetry5. The War Poetry6. More War Poetry7. Order and AdventureConclusionBibliographyIndex