Volume 25, Number 16 · October 26, 1978
On Apollinaire
By Robert Mazzocco
Apollinaire seems to me the best of the 'poets of the future' in this century. His entire Oeuvre should really be called A la recherche de l'avenir. Although he was born in 1880 and died in 1918 and thus spent less than two decades in the century with which he's so closely identified, it is the search for the future—that is, the meaning of the arts in the twentieth century—that was to give his brief mercurial life its underlying stability and his poems their distinctive gaiety and pessimism. He thought of art us a battlefield, but with comrades rather than enemies—the enemies were in fact simply the people who couldn't see the future or understand it. And Apollinaire's battle was to make the future clear to himself and to others. His best poems—poems like 'Les collines,' 'Vendemiare,' 'La jolle rousse.' 'Zone,' 'La Maison des Marts'—have about them the force of prophecy, are extravagant visions, vatic chants, commingling of the carnal and celestial, yet rendered in an extremely simple voice; the language itself is not simple, or is simple only in the sense of Adam at the dawn of paradise naming the animals…
Feature, 1340 words
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