Books by Guillaume Apollinaire

When Guillaume Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, as the result of a war wound, he was already known as one of the most original and important poets of his time. He had led the migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse; he had helped formulate the principles of Cubism, having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word "Surrealist"; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avant-garde. This bilingual, illustrated edition of The Selected Writings of Apollinaire, the only representative collection in English translation, begins with a comprehensive critical Introduction by the translator, Roger Shattuck. The next section is devoted to poetry. Included here are almost half of Apollinaire's two best-known volumes, Alcools and Calligrammes, as well as a selection from five other books, and the long love poem La Chanson du Mal-Aimé in its entirety. The prose section leads off with "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poetes", a seminal discussion of modern poetry that anticipates such movements as Dada and Futurism. This is followed by Apollinaire's almost unobtainable "Introduction to Baudelaire and Oneirocriticism", an early experimental work composed in a style prophetic of Surrealist automatic writing. There are, in addition, two stories, a passage from Anecdotiques, and a section from the novel Le Poete Assassiné.

Apollinaire - Roman by birth, Polish by name, Parisian by choice - died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists. This title presents Apollinaire's poems.

Guiilaume Apollinaire, a leading figure amongst the young writers and artists in France until his death in 1918, published 'Alcools', his first book of poems, in 1913. With its wide range of verse forms and contrasting registers of style, 'Alcools' had a considerable influence on Surrealist poetry. The poems provide a splendid example of the lyrical art in which the paradoxes of Apollinaire are held in high poetic tension. The editor's introduction and notes take place in the 20th Century and explain allusion and difficulties in the text.