by Louisa McDonald

Two days before Armistice Day in 1918, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who could be considered to be one of the most important European poets of the first half of the twentieth century, died of the Spanish Influenza, a pandemic which was sweeping Europe at the time and ended up taking more lives than the First World War had done. Right up until his death, Apollinaire continued to write poetry, poetry which was inspired by the suffering he had experienced during the war but by no means limited to it. In times not unlike our own, Apollinaire found creativity amidst the pandemic, bringing together visual art and poetry to create a composite art form: that of the calligram.

Apollinaire was, in every respect, an experimentalist figure. A precursor of Cubism who had inspired and been inspired by artistic movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, his earlier works, such as those in the volume Alcools (1913) had been characterised by the literary fragmentation of experience that was typical of early 20th Century Modernism; his epic poem ‘Zone’, which explores Paris through such a lens, has been called “the great poem of early Modernism” by the scholar Martin Sorrell. It is also important to note that although he was primarily a writer, Apollinaire always maintained a close relationship with the visual arts. Not only was Apollinaire romantically involved with the artist Marie Laurencin (a portrait by Henri Rousseau depicts the two together), he also boasted of friends such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Robert and Sonia Delauney, who pioneered the Orphist movement. Apollinaire was once even falsely suspected of stealing the Mona Lisa and subsequently arrested and detained, although thankfully he was released after six days due to a lack of evidence. The influence of the visual arts on Apollinaire’s work can be seen in his early poems, some of which are dedicated to certain artists, but it is only in Calligrammes (1918) that Apollinaire truly attempts to combine visual art with poetry to create a new art form, one in which the two elements are interdependent and rely on each other for meaning.

A calligram is essentially a form of typography in which a poem is written in a certain shape, for example, in the shape of a woman with a hat:

An important aspect of Apollinaire’s calligrams is that they rely on both form and content for meaning: the words are partially given literary and poetic significance in virtue of being arranged in a certain way to produce a particular visual effect. Equally, the visual images are different from art forms such as paintings by virtue of the fact that they are constructed out of words; they would not exist in the same way without their literary dimension. The relationship between the lyrics and the visual image, then, are co-dependent insofar as each element requires the other in order to be able to come together in the form of a complete poem. Thus, a calligram acts as a synthesis of poetry and visual art. Apollinaire had said that he, too, considered himself a kind of painter («Et moi aussi je suis peintre»); through the creation of the Calligrammes, he became both poet and artist, blurring the distinction between the two.

But the calligrams were not merely the product of a desire to become closer to the visual arts that Apollinaire so admired; they were also a way of creatively expressing and dealing with suffering, both that of Apollinaire himself and of Europe as a whole as it found itself stricken with war and disease. It is perhaps important to note the subtitle of the book: Poems of peace and of war, 1913-1916. Whilst Apollinaire’s earlier poems had largely focused on urban landscapes and the fragmentation of consciousness, Calligrammes included poems which detailed the poet’s experiences in the war, along with all the loss and trauma these experiences brought with them. In the poem, ‘La Colombe poignardée et le Jet d’eau’ (The Injured Dove and the Jet of Water), Apollinaire combines the visual image of the dove with lyrics evoking the power of war to take away that which we hold most dear to us; it is the bringing together of these two elements that gives the poem its unique ability to give something of an expression to the inexpressible. Whilst the poem does not aim to be realistic in the way that other poems about the First World War often did, its use of the metaphorical image of the injured dove can perhaps be said to more accurately capture the general horror of war, as it shows the corruption of an image emblematic of innocence and purity:

Nor are the Calligrammes merely about the memory of suffering; as he was writing much of the volume, Apollinaire was suffering from a head wound he had acquired during the war, and later, from the Spanish Influenza from which he never recovered. The poems which might at first glance seem optimistic and playful are, in fact, born out of suffering. Yet through combining visual art with literature, the calligrams give a unique angle on this suffering by attempting to communicate through pictorial forms that which cannot necessarily be expressed in words; the unimaginable and ineffable nature of suffering is partially captured through visual metaphor.

Apollinaire was, amongst other things, a poet of a pandemic, creating artwork not in spite of a troubled world, but directly in response to it. Perhaps his unorthodox imagination could be an inspiration to artists, poets or other creatives wishing to respond to the situation of the pandemic today.

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