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Register — opens a dialog box. Sign in — opens a dialog box. Les Arcs sur Argens Hotels. Le Logis Du Guetteur. Le Logis Du Guetteur Reserve now. Traveler photo of Les Arcs sur Argens. Beautiful renovation of an ancient castle , in a lovely classic French town David, United Kingdom. Views from the property. Previous image of the property Next image of the property. Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property Image of the property.
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No children 1 child 2 children 3 children 4 children 5 children 6 children 7 children 8 children 9 children 10 children. I'm traveling for work. Like this one but not totally sure yet? What guests loved the most: See all guest reviews for Le Logis Du Guetteur. Stayed in September Hotel room Stayed in September Stayed in July Location Stayed in June Friendly staff Stayed in June Stayed in May Stayed in March Stayed in February Stayed in November Stayed in October Beautiful renovation of an ancient castle , in a lovely classic French town Stayed in August Location fantastica Stayed in August Breakfast is ridiculously expensive The location is sensational Stayed in August Both words occur at the end of 'Zone': Et tu bois cct alcool brulant comme ta vie Ta vie que tu bois comme cette eau-de-vie and he uses both in a rather precious dedication which he inscribed on a copy of the volume which he presented to Marie Laurencin: Alcools, Club du meilleur livre, , pp.
The volume contains fifty poems of which forty-three had already appeared in different literary reviews, six 'La Blanche Neige', 'Un Soir', '', 'A la Sante', 'Automne malade' and 'Hotels' were printed in the volume for the first tirne and one 'Chantre' was added on the proofs. As indicated by the title, the date of composition of the poems lies between and A few of the poems are dated by Apollinaire but the problems of dating the remainder are very considerable. The pioneer work of LeRoy C. Decaudin's Le Dossier d' 'Alcools' are indispensable tools for any examination of this complex issue.
Apollinaire wrote quickly, often leaving lines and poems unfinished. They were set aside and fragments incorporated into poems composed at a much later date; examples are quoted in notes to individual poems. Durry has described the technique as that of a 'mosaiiste' or 'marqueteur' and Breunig has used the word 'collage'. Nor are existing manuscripts always authoritative evidence for Apollinaire sometimes wrote on headed notepaper acquired years earlier.
Because the order of the poems is not chronological there has been much speculation on why any particular poem should occupy the place it does. Since the publication of Les Fleurs du mal and Baudelaire's confession to Alfred de Vigny sent with a copy of the second edition 'Le seul eloge que je sollicite pour ce livre est qu'on reconnaisse qu'ii n'est pas un pur album et qu'il a un commencement et une fin' , it has become irresistibly tempting to try to discover in any collection of poems a secret order of presentation in which a poem gains added significance from its place, its meaning being influenced by what has gone before and by what is to follow.
There is no such evidence to be found in the arrangement of Alcools nor did Apollinaire admit of any such underlying intention. The volume opens and closes with a long poem. In the first poem, the poet's geographical wanderings mirror the frantic movements of his mind in his search for explanation and justification, ending in the hopeless light of another despairing dawn; in 'Vendemiaire', it is the world and its cities which come to him, to pay homage to the poet, centre of the universe.
Here the dawn has all the trappings of joyful promise. Scott Bates has argued that Apolliri- Introduction 9 aire broke away from chronology to establish a 'simultaneous unity' of poetic personality and theme. There is no grouping by subject; long poems are separated by short poems. The denial of any facile autobiographical chronology allows the poet to cover his tracks and to diminish the element of direct confession. The variety of styles from the earliest to the later poems confers on the book a greater impression of originality.
Typography, too, has a role to play for Apollinaire had a keen eye for lay-out. It is clear that he is a 'natural' poet to whom the act of writing in verse is easier, he confessed, than writing in prose. Even in the trenches, the flow of verse went on uninterrupted, quickened indeed by the new excitements. The Pleiade edition of his poetic works comes to over pages. Andre Salmon said of him: Tl etait toujours en train d'ecrire quelque chose tire de lui par 1'exterieur ou 1'interieur' cit.
Durry, 'Alcools', i, p. It is the practice of poetry that interested Apollinaire for he is not one of the great poetcritics in the tradition of Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery. Indeed, Andre Breton described him, with justification, as a 'mediocre estheticien'. Apollinaire's life was too disjointed, too busy to foster mature reflection; much of his critical work was written for those weeklies and monthlies in which he had a regular column. Paul Adam is judged to be one of the 'grands ecrivains de son epoque'.
This may be because Apollinaire is essentially a critic of encouragement for whom positive affirmation is more important than destruction. He shows a marked preference for the new and the modern, but as he gained experience, there are startling flashes of perception. Above all, he is the master of the revealing anecdote. Curiously enough, his aesthetic meditations are hinged more to the body of his art criticism than to the literary chroniques.
The lecture on 'L'Esprit nouveau et les Io Introduction poetes' is the most sustained of his pieces of pure literary criticism. It is clear that Apollinaire's verse is above all lyrical in that it is based on his own emotional experiences, that it is a confession however veiled and that it is poles apart from, for example, the cooler intellectualised verse of Paul Valery, his near contemporary. His statement already quoted that 'chacun de mes poemes est la commemoration d'un evenement de ma vie' admits the personal element which lies behind his work, but is, in some respects, misleading.
Apollinaire's reticence guards his ultimate privacy and, at a moment when the poem seems to be on the edge of the last confession, the emotional temperature is abruptly lowered. He denies the traditional closed circle of lyrical obsession —man, emotion, nature—by the violent, unexpected intrusions of the external world at the critical moment.
In 'Les Colchiques', a Baudelairian correspondance is established in the first stanza ending: Le colchique coulcur dc cerne ct de lilas Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-la Violatres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s'empoisonne but the next line denies the claustrophobic atmosphere by introducing a foreign element which has nothing at all to do with the theme of the poem: Les enfants de 1'ecole viennent avec fracas Vetus de hoquetons et jouant de Pharmonica.
There are many examples of such deflations of what is traditionally a private introspection: Sur le chemin du bord du fleuve lentement Un ours un singe un chien menes par des tziganes Suivaient une roulotte trainee par un ane Tandis que s'eloignait dans les vignes rhenanes Sur un fifre lointain un air de regiment. The procedure is too common for it to be explained by the chance of composition of one or two poems. The same effect in defusing Introduction 11 emotion is sometimes obtained by stylistic means. In 'La Chanson du mal-aime' a harrowing passage of regret on the theme: O mon ombre en dcuil de moi-meme 1.
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Et moi j'ai le cceur aussi gros Qu'un cul de dame damascene It is one of the many paradoxes of Apollinaire that he should welcome the sufferings imposed on him by life and, in particular, by love. He wrote rather naively to Lou on 11 April C'est la une source intarissable de poesie. II est vrai qu'il faut que la souffrance ne dure pas trop long temps' Lettres a Lou, p. It is not of course only the emotion of love which lies at the heart of Apollinaire's lyricism.
In he wrote to Toussaint Luca, an old school-friend: A man of his age, he discovered around him ample material for reflection and yet he never ignored the sweep of history, legend and myth. The curiously disparate allusions which decorate his poems are drawn from a vast range and yet he was not an erudite man in any disciplined sense.
His knowledge has been gathered from his omnivorous but undirected reading and a truly remarkable memory permitted him to exhume rare facts which he used to illuminate his ideas. The paradox of the 'modern' poet who calls upon the past is another of the bewildering sides of his work. His devise d'editeur invented for the first edition of Le Bestiaire was 'J'emerveille'; Apollinaire's great gift was to be able to stand in wonder before the past as well as the present. His erudition allowed him another mode of disguise and also conferred a certain universality on the experiences of one man.
It was for Apollinaire a manifestation of 12 Introduction the poetic imagination. Writing on anecdotes featuring Gerard de Nerval reprinted in Les Marges in , Apollinaire repeated a conversation in which Nerval had referred to a number of obscure thinkers and commented: Je 1'eusse aime comme un frere. Et qu'on ne s'y trompe point, une telle conversation n'indique pas ce qu'il est convenu aujourd'hui d'appeler de Perudition et qui n'en est point; c'etait tout simplement 1'indice d'une imagination ardente qu'il essayait de mettre a la portee de son interlocuteur en choisissant parmi les notions que tout le monde peut avoir acquises, les plus rares.
It is in this sense that he sought for a 'lyrisme humaniste'. One of the constants in Apollinaire's poetry is the creative tension described in the well-known lines of 'La Jolie Rousse' Calligrammes]: Je juge cette longue querelle de la tradition et de 1'invention De 1'Ordre et de 1'Aventure.
Tradition and ordre represent for Apollinaire the heritage of a long poetic tradition whilst invention and aventure are the aesthetic response to the challenge of contemporary life, both in ideas and in technique. It is a measure of the strength of his belief in the relevance of the past that he, acknowledged leader of the young generation of avant-garde writers, should, in , begin his lecture on L'Esprit nouveau et les poetes in this way: L'esprit nouveau qui s'annonce pretend avant tout heriter des classiques un solide bon sens, un esprit critique assure, des vues d'ensemble sur 1'univers et dans 1'ame humaine, et le sens du devoir qui depouille les sentiments et en limite ou plutot en contient les manifestations.
II pretend encore heriter des romantiques une curiosite qui le pousse a explorer tous les domaines propres a fournir une matiere litteraire qui permette d'exalter la vie sous quelque forme qu'elle se presente. The lyrical mode encourages a certain backward look and he wrote wryly: This admiration for the past is in no way a sterile imitation; it holds in a creative equilibrium his urge to experiment and so, by checks and balances, shapes that part of his poetry which seeks new forms of expressions.
Eliot in his sharply perceptive essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' first published in , 'his significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists'. The whole essay is an admirable commentary on the Apollinaire situation. He belongs to the endless tradition of writers who, having suffered the same anguish, triumphantly translated suffering into art.
It is in this sense that he could write: II ne faut point voir de tristesse dans mon ceuvre, mais la vie m6me, avec une constante et consciente volupte" de vivre, de connaitre, de voir, de savoir et d'exprimer. Both urges coexisted in him for, as he stated firmly in Les Peintres cubistes: The nature of contemporaneity contains many different things for him: He felt this deeply and at times even uncritically; he was afraid that he might not rise to the challenge of his times, as is apparent in a letter to Andre Gide dated June Je n'ai faim ni de gloire ni d'argent mais seulement de mon temps.
Adema, Apollinaire, , p. Le nouveau est, par definition, la partie peYissable des choses. Le 14 Introduction danger du nouveau est qu'il cesse automatiquement de 1'etre et qu'il le cesse en pure perte. Comme la jeunesse et la vie. Essayer de s'opposer a cette perte c'est done agir contre le nouveau. Le nouveau n'a d'attraits irresistibles que pour les esprits qui demandent au simple changement leur excitation maxima.
Ce qui est le meilleur dans le nouveau est ce qui repond a un desir ancien. CEuvres, Pleiade, ii, pp. La modernite, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitie de 1'art, dont 1'autre moitid est Peternel et 1'immuable. II y a eu une modernite pour chaque peintre ancien. The decor of the age appears often in Alcools, from the 'grace de cette rue industrielle' of 'Zone5 to the lurid noise of the city at night in 'La Chanson du mal-aime': Soirs de Paris ivres du gin Flambant de 1'electricite Les tramways feux verts sur 1'echine Musiquent au long des portees De rails leur folie de machines The challenge of the century expressed itself in the shock and surprise of a new vision, the need of the writer to find an idiom suitable for the expression of new ideas, the changed identity of man, speed and discontinuity.
Apollinaire's poetic temperament reacted to these problems in a number of ways.
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High upon the list of attitudes required by Introduction 15 the writer in his struggle with the contemporary came surprise, 'le plus grand ressort nouveau'. The technique of surprise for Apollinaire extended to vocabulary, images, versification and registers of style, all of which we shall examine later. It included a sharp sense of incongruity 'La Maison des morts' , of situation the flight of Christ in 'Zone' , of character 'Merlin et la vieille femme'.
Surprise often deepens into shock and the danger here is that surprise may become an end in itself, that the search for the unexpected begins to dominate at the expense of the unity of the poem. The success of Apollinaire within this field must be judged against these words of Valery: La surprise, objet de 1'art? Mais on se trompe souvent sur le genre de surprise qui est digne de 1'art.
II n'y faut pas de surprises finies qui consistent dans le seul inattendu; mais des surprises infinies, qui soient obtenues par une disposition toujours renaissante, et contre laquelle toute 1'attente du monde ne peut preValoir. CEuvres, Pleiade, ii, p. Problems concerning the inter-relationship of the arts present enormous difficulties. It is very doubtful whether the description 'poesie cubiste' applied to Apollinaire's work by certain critics has any real significance. It makes little sense to talk about Cubist poetry: The painter creates a picture which can be embraced in a single glance, simultaneously, but poetry requires that we read word by word, line by line, successively, in a series of impressions which cannot achieve the immediacy of impact of painting.
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Both poets and painters may be impelled by similar reactions, by current ideas, by new aesthetic experiences like the revelations of primitive art in 16 Introduction exhibitions held in Paris galleries early in the century; certainly, the very fact of friendship presupposes a similarity of temperament and a community of interest. If there is a confusion of terms between Cubist painting and 'poesie cubiste' it is none of Apollinaire's making. In an essay on Henri Matisse dating from , he said clearly: C'est que chez Matisse 1'expression plastique est un but, de me'me que pour le poete 1'expression lyrique.
II n'existe pas de relations entre le cubisme et la nouvelle orientation litte"raire. Les peintres cubistes se servent d'e"lements accessoires, d'e'le'ments exterieurs pour construire leurs oeuvres. Leurs oeuvres sont essentiellement destinies aux regards des spectateurs devant lesquels elles exhibent, pour ainsi dire, les secrets de leurs volumes et le jeu de leurs dimensions. Ce sont bien plutot des ceuvres d'analyse, analyse simple chez les uns, complexe chez les autres. Les notres, au contraire, s'acheminent directement vers 1'esprit, aupres duquel elles remplissent plutot une fonction de synthese; ce n'est pas pour rien qu'elles sont lyriques.
These discriminations do not mean that Apollinaire was unaffected by the Cubist experiment: There are three ways in which his poetic views gained from his frequentation of Cubism. Firstly, there is the audacity of the work which he described in as 'la manifestation artistique la plus elevee de notre epoque' O. Over the years it stimulated him to reflect on the problems it raised.
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His collected articles published in the Introduction 17 Meditations esthetiques—Les Peintres cubistes were not, he insisted, an 'ouvrage de vulgarisation de cubisme'. They were, he argued, 'meditations esthetiques et rien d'autre'. Yet, in some ways, this is the attraction of opposites, as LeRoy C. Breunig has pointed out, for the style of Cubism was antithetic to Apollinaire: Les elements de la realitd: Plus on connait le temperament violent de Picasso et plus on admire le sacrifice surhumain qu'il s'est impose" entre et pour formuler un style si sobre, si asce"tique.
G'etait cet effort he"roiique qu'admirait Apollinaire. This end to vraisemblance, to mimetic art, conferred on all artists a new freedom in which the work of art gained an autonomous existence, became an object in itself creating its own reality and justification. In poetic terms, this encouraged Apollinaire to depart from narration, description and the drive towards the pure evocation of emotion. The act of analysis resulting eventually in the synthesis of a recreated object conferred on the artist the powers of a creator, the ability to 'ordonner un chaos'.
Images taken from the Book of Genesis are never very far from Apollinaire's mind in this context. A third and deeply personal gain from Cubism is to be seen in his treatment of time. In his analysis and subsequent recreation of the object, the Cubist painter abolishes successive moments of time in favour of a simultaneous view. We can only perceive the human face in all its shapes from profile to full face in succession.
These different aspects imply the existence of time as a linear, irreversible flow which is traditionally rendered by the use of perspective. Picasso, Braque and the Cubists present simultaneously aspects of objects which we have been educated to perceive only as successive: From this Apollinaire discovered the virtues of discontinuity, of the denial of time compartmentalised and separated into past, present and future, concepts which confer on his poetry much of its impact. Tristan Tzara has described in this way the impact of Cubism on Apollinaire's style: Pour Apollinaire, la solution du re"alisme adoptee par les peintres cubistes faisait deja partie de sa conception poetique.
La decomposition par eux preconisee des elements objectifs etait destinee a une reconstitution ulterieure selon un ordre plus proche de la nature intime des choses et de leur situation dans I'espace que la vision apparente reproduite sur la toile plane au milieu des tricheries de la perspective et des illusions figuratives. Alcools, Club du meilleur livre, p. La poesie est meme etymologiquement la creation. La creation, expression sereine de 1'intelligence hors du temps est la joie parfaite.
Guiraud, Index du vocabulaire du Symbolisme, i, Index des mots d' l Alcools' de Guillaume Apollinaire, the noun used most frequently in Alcools is amour fifty-three times and aimer fortynine times , the most used verb after aller. This is a fair indication of the importance of the experience of love as a theme in Alcools.
The first four poems, 'Zone', 'Le Pont Mirabeau', 'La Chanson du mal-aime' and 'Les Colchiques' are all concerned with the poet's emotional history although, characteristically, they all include much wider-ranging issues. The major impression received by the reader of Alcools is that of the sadness of love: L'amour lourd comme un ours prive 'La Tzigane' and: Lotte 1'amour rend triste 'Les Femmes' Close behind is the idea of treachery which informs 'La Chanson du mal-aime': La faussete de 1'amour meme.
Apollinaire's own mischance in his sentimental experience leads him to generalise: L'amour est devenu mauvais 'Le Brasier' and to reflect on the transience of love: L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante 'Le Pont Mirabeau' 'La Chanson du mal-aime' is a comprehensive anthology of the poet's conflicting attitudes to love, ranging from tenderness to hate.
The happiness of love is rarely evoked in the present tense but the 'Aubade' triumphantly recalls a happy moment of the past. We have already noticed the reticence which veils his poems when they appear to be on the verge of a too-personal confession, but the elaborate use of legendary, historical o r mythological figures also covers his tracks and confers a new so Introduction dimension on private experience. Apollinaire frequently applies the same names and the same references to the different women of his life.
The element of eroticism is carefully hidden in Alcools and, indeed, in all the poems Apollinaire published under his own name during his lifetime. There is no doubt that Apollinaire had a considerable interest in eroticism in theory he published anonymously two pornographic novels Les Memoires de Don Juan and Les Onze mille verges in as well as in practice, if we are to believe the Lettres a Lou first published in The obscurity of the sept epees in 'La Chanson du mal-aime' bears witness to his discretion.
There is however a saving factor in his dismal record, hinted at in the epigraph to 'La Chanson du mal-aime' and added some years after the events: Et je chantais cette romance En sans savoir Que mon amour a la semblance Du beau Phenix s'il meurt un soir Le matin voit sa renaissance.
In spite of his own experiences, love remained for Apollinaire a perennial renewal and challenge, its upsurge often coinciding with a change in direction of his aesthetic practices. The lines from the 'Poeme lu au mariage d'Andre Salmon' reflect this positive element: Rejouissons-nous parce que directeur du feu et des poetes L'amour qui emplit ainsi que la lumiere Tout le solide espace entre les etoiles et les planetes L'amour veut qu'aujourd'hui mon ami Andre Salmon se marie.
The general impression engendered by Apollinaire's reflections on love are heightened by the use he makes of nature in this context, as a 'correspondance' or as an 'etat d'ame'; it is almost always autumn which provides the setting. Autumn is the season of death: Dieu de mes dieux morts en automne 'La Chanson du mal-aime', 1. Pauvre automne Meurs en blancheur et en richesse De neige et de fruits murs 'Automne malade', In 'Signe' he wrote: Je suis soumis au Chef du Signe de PAutomne and, later in the same poem: Mon Automne eternelle 6 ma saison mentale.
There is an easy identification here for that melancholy side of Apollinaire, surrendering itself to the long poetic tradition which equates autumn with the death of nature and the death of love. The presence of death is everywhere in Alcools surprisingly, there are more references to mort and its derivatives in this volume than in Calligrammes, in spite of the war poems but as an inescapable fact of the human condition rather than as an obsession.
The presence of the dead amongst the living in 'La Maison des morts', has sadder overtones in 'Rhenane d'automne'. Apollinaire has a marked feeling for the processes of decay which is manifested with greater subtlety in 'Mai'. The poem begins idyllically: Le mai le joli mai en barque sur le Rhin but spring, the season of love and renewal, is flawed: The month of May, dying itself, decorates, not the rebirth of the season but: Le mai le joli mai a par6 les ruines.
Apollinaire notes the same phenomenon more briefly in 'Zone': Apollinaire, insecure as he was in his life and in his restless search for new aesthetic directions, desired permanence and indeed the dialogue between transience and permanence is central to his work. He confessed in a letter on 4 August Rien ne determine plus de melancolie chez moi que cette fuite du temps. Elle est en desaccord si formel avec mon sentiment, mon identite, qu'elle est la source meme de ma poesie. Earlier, in the same letter, he had said: His attachment to the known is a manifestation of his desire for stability: Les hommes ne se separent de rien sans regret et meme les lieux, les choses et les gens qui les rendirent le plus malheureux, ils ne les abandonnent point sans douleur'.
His obsession with the passing of time takes on different forms. Sometimes the poet has the irrepressible feeling that time passes him by the river image is common here as in 'Le Pont Mirabeau'; at other times, the poet is irrevocably swept away by time from actual or potential happiness, as in 'Mai': Le mai le joli mai en barque sur le Rhin Des dames regardaient du haut de la montagne Vous etes si jolies mais la barque s'eloigne.
This is of course one of the commonest of lyrical themes but Apollinaire gives it a particular individual twist. There is the tough realistic admission that time past cannot be recalled: J'ai eu le courage de regarder en arriere Les cadavres de mes jours 'Les Fiancailles', The lines of'Cortege' are relevant: In this sense time is invincible but in Apollinaire's work, the idea of rebirth and resurrection is strong, as witness the lines from 'Merlin et la vieille femme': Merlin guettait la vie et 1'eternelle cause Qui fait mourir et puis renaitre 1'univers In the splendid line of 'La Chanson du mal-aime': Mon beau navire 6 ma memoire I- 50 the poet acknowledges the freedom which memory confers on him to explore the past whilst remaining in the present.
The imagination, working on the products of the memory, can reinterpret and override the linear flow of time. The past is thus recreated at the poet's will. Fire is seen as a force which consumes and purifies: The image takes on Christian overtones in: Langues de feu ou sont-elles mes pentecotes 'Palais', 1. II n'y a plus rien de commun entre moi Et ceux qui craignent les brulures 'Le Brasier', Reference has already been made to Apollinaire's insecurities and feelings of alienation: Essays presented to C. Hackett, Oxford, Blackwell, There are no poems in Alcools which have an exclusively religious theme and yet the whole volume draws much sustenance from the Bible.
Robert Couffignal U Inspiration biblique dans Vasuvre de Guillaume Apollinaire , has traced the borrowings which Apollinaire constantly made from the Bible, in his prose as well as his verse. The great central event of the Christian faith—the Resurrection—has a privileged place in his imagery but in the main, except for the fundamental self-questioning, his interest is attached to the minor biblical figures and events which figure in his curious history of human achievement. There is certainly no anti-clericalism in Alcools and no attack on religion. Durry has well said, 'une nostalgic de la foi'.
The Bible has of course a strong element of le merveilleux which greatly appealed to Apollinaire and added to his private gallery of other magical figures like Orpheus, Icarus and Merlin. This is another area in which the Surrealists will recognise the originality of his vision. What emerges from Alcools is Apollinaire's growing consciousness that the poet is a unique interpreter of the world, a creator, like God. Le mdtier de poete n'est pas inutile, ni fou, ni frivoie.
Les poetes sont les createurs. Rien ne vient done sur terre, n'apparait aux yeux des hommes s'il n'a d'abord 6te imaging par un poete he wrote 18 January , Lettres a Lou, p. He triumphs over the world: The poet's triumph is over nature, time, regret and the human condition itself. The materials from which he creates are all around us; Tart nait ou il peut' he wrote in O.
If there is to be any renewal of man's vision of the world, it is to the poet that he will owe it: His poems hold in tension so many conflicting attitudes and beliefs: Like alcool itself, a magical process involving fire and water, the poems create from conflict a new and heady vision of the world. His youthful poems reveal his preoccupation with traditional forms as well as a desire to avail himself of the new liberties of metrics developed by the Symbolists.
Thus, of the poems shown to Toussaint Luca, his friend at the Lycee de Nice in , 'Mort de Pan' signed with his early pseudonym of Guillaume Macabre is a sonnet in classical alexandrines, whilst 'Mardi gras' and 'Aurore d'hiver' O. He agreed enthusiastically with Francis Viele-Griffin's definition of free verse as 'une conquete morale' but argued strongly that it was not 'une simplification prosa'ique de la poesie' 'Jean Royere', O. Its invention gave a boost to lyricism and, whether or not a poet Introduction 27 availed himself of it, his choice of metre was now more informed, more deliberate, because an alternative was open to him: Lettres a sa marraine, 30 October , O.
He claimed proudly in a letter to Andre Billy: There are many references to Apollinaire's methods of composition. En effet Madeleine je ne compose qu'en chantant. Bien loin de faire le vers a sa table comme nous faisions tous. Cette poesie etait vraiment inspired, il allongeait les notes pour mettre une syllabe de plus ou au contraire en supprimer.
Parent, Klincksieck, , M. Decaudin has remarked that 'le compte des syllabes est soumis a 1'oreille bien plus qu'a la regie. Apollinaire a le sens de la poesie parlee, il entend le vers'. So, Decaudin argues, one must say in 'Mai': Devant son tribunal Pevequ e la fit citer D'avance il 1'absolvit a caus e de sa beaute O belle Loreley aux yeux pleins de pierr e ries De quel magici-en tiens-tu la sorcell e rie.
But Apollinaire was also affected by the typographical disposition of the poem on the page. Bearing in mind his experiments in Calligrammes where poems are set out in the form appropriate to the subject 'La Cravate et la montre', 'Cceur couronne et miroir', 'II Pleut' printed in slanting lines across the page , he wrote in 'L'Esprit nouveau et le poetes': Les artifices typographiques pousses tres loin avec une grande audace ont 1'avantage de faire naitre un lyrisme visuel qui 6tait presque inconnu avant notre epoque.
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine. Et nos amours, faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne? La joie venait toujours apres la peine. In Alcools, its disposition is changed and becomes more interesting: Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours apres la peine. His use of rhyme is very daring. He never lost sight of the value of rhyme in the free rhythms of vers libre, both for its importance in marking line endings and for the potential of Introduction 29 surprise. Warren Ramsey well summarized Apollinaire's importance in the field of versification when he wrote: The suppression of all punctuation on the proofs of Alcools has given rise to much critical comment.
Louise Faure-Favier tells it thus. Paul Morisse of the editorial staff of the Mercure de France picked up a number of errors of punctuation on the proof sheets of Alcools and drew the poet's attention to them. Souvenirs sur Apollinaire, Grasset, , pp. Mallarme had suppressed punctuation in his later poems and in Marinetti's manifestos in favour of Futurism had advocated, amongst other things, the end of punctuation. In the same year, 'Zone' and 'Vendemiaire' appeared in reviews without punctuation, almost certainly before Apollinaire received the proofs of Alcools.
Apollinaire's own explanation is contained in a letter to Henri Martineau, 19 July O. Pour ce qui concerne la ponctuation je ne 1'ai supprime'e que parce qu'elle m'a paru inutile et elle Test en effet, le rythme meme et la coupe des vers voila la veritable ponctuation et il n'en est point besoin d'une autre. The recordings of'Le Pont Mirabeau', 'Marie' and 'Le Voyageur' made by Apollinaire himself for the Archives de la parole in the Sorbonne in makes clear how the poet, in his grave, rather light voice, observes strictly the ending of each line.
The suppression of punctuation adds to the flow of the poem, confers on it an added ambiguity and—an essential tribute which all readers must pay to the poet—causes us to slow down our reading. The style of Apollinaire avoids rhetoric and it is this aspect which has proved most influential.
He moved later towards a belief in a rapid notation: All these create an unstable poetic climate. For Tristan Tzara this marked a reaction away from a 'mallarmeisme savant' back to a tradition: Alcools, Club du meilleur livre, pp. His use of the pun 'le calembour createur' for Mme Durry and 'le calembour tremplin' for Max Jacob, opens up subtle perspectives. The image plays an important role in Apollinaire's poetry but in a somewhat different way from Symbolism. It is rare to find in his work a poem which is entirely constructed around a central image or series of images: He does not favour the structure implicit in poems like Baudelaire's 'La Ghevelure' or the 'Spleen' series and had rather turned away from this, as witness his statement in a letter: On s'est habitu6 aux images.
Paul Reverdy's definition of a literary image as 'le rapprochement spontane de deux realites tres distinctes dont 1'esprit seul a saisi les rapports' is particularly apposite. Apollinaire's inexhaustible curiosity furnishes the diverse elements to make an image combining the traditional with the modern by a striking adaptation of a pastoral image to the context of the city: Bergere 6 tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bele ce soir 'Zone', 1.
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Des troupeaux d'autobus mugissants pres de toi roulent ibid. Et moi j'ai le coeur aussi gros Qu'un cul de dame damascene 'La Chanson du mal-aim6', C'est la lune qui cuit comme un ceuf sur le plat 'Les Fiansailles', 1. Le soleil ce jour-la s'etalait comme un ventre Maternel qui saignait lentement sur le ciel La lumiere est ma mere 6 lumiere sanglante Les nuages coulaient comme un flux menstruel 'Merlin et la vieille femme', Les bees de gaz pissaient leur flamme au clair de lune 'Les Fiancailles', 1.
It was a long-held belief of his that even the most insignificant object could hold powerful meanings; in 'L'Esprit nouveau et les poetes' he insisted that 'le moindre fait est pour le poete le postulat, le point de depart d'une immensite inconnue ou flambent les feux de joie de significations multiples', and again, 'On peut partir d'un fait quotidien: It was this emphasis on the presence of poetry in the most banal aspects of life which he might have found in Baudelaire which made Apollinaire one of the sources of Surrealism.
Andre Breton thought that Apollinaire's 'trouvailles d'images' had the effect of 'creations spontanees' and Tristan Tzara wrote admiringly of his 'images de choc'. Certain obsessive images emerge from the volume. Light signifies lucidity, hope, confidence, the future and, combined with fire, the magic and dangerous alcool as well as the poet's sacrifice in creation. Darkness and particularly ombres represent despair, the subconscious, the past seen not as the repository of happiness but as a dead weight across the future. Firstly, the denial of eloquence practised by Apollinaire has become an accepted ambition of young poets in England and America as well as in France.
If Eluard admired his elder it was largely for this reason, seen in his own statement: He finally destroyed any lingering idea of hierarchy of poetic vocabulary. Next, Apollinaire's consciousness of the discontinuity of the human experience of reality is sharp and very much in accord with twentieth-century rejections of nineteenth-century concepts of literary realism. The structure of the poems of Alcools rarely depends on narrative structures or time sequences rigorously preserved. Linear time is confused by a subtle use of tenses.
The controlling power of the imagination over the memory recreates the past and the present into a Proustian dimension where both are equally privileged. Then there is the experience of alienation, most strongly described in 'Zone' but apparent even in the earlier Rhineland poems. Its taste is sharp and disturbing although it never seeks the black hopelessness of Sartre's La Nausee. Here again Apollinaire is dealing with a key theme of twentieth-century literature.
The struggle with angoisse is never very far beneath the surface although the resultant depressions never last for very long. It is this affirmation of optimism which was recognised by Paul Eluard when he said of Apollinaire in a broadcast in Celui qui a dit: A y regarder de pres, il n'y a, dans 1'oeuvre d'Apollinaire, que cette certitude cent fois avouee, a travers les themes les plus diflfdrents. Apollinaire nous dit sans cesse 1'avenir en travail dans 1'esprit humain.
What does come through with increasing force is his view of the role of the poet as creator.
It is a revival of the nineteenthcentury view of the poet-magus in Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud but its reformulation by Apollinaire, firmly in the context of his own age, takes on a considerable significance. Quoting Apollinaire's view that 'la surprise est le plus grand ressort nouveau', Andre Breton went on to say: Lastly, there is Apollinaire's dazzling handling of a diversity of verse forms and of images. His use of the octosyllabic line proved a powerful example for both Aragon and Eluard. His paradoxical nature provides an undogmatic example of the potential of poetry.
Poet of the city, he is also a nature poet of deep perceptiveness; poet of bonte, he is also a poet of war; poet of the new, he is also a poet whose debt to the past is always generously acknowledged. Apollinaire solved unselfconsciously the problem that was to confound so many writers of Surrealism and of the later 'underground'.
If poetry is to reach a wider audience and is to be rescued from the jealous hands of an elite remembering Lautreamont's much-applauded statement that 'la poesie doit etre faite par tous et non par un' , it must have as its first requirement an ability to communicate directly. The apostles of the avant-garde demand experimental forms and so alienate the very converts they seek, readers whose literary upbringing has been strictly in the most conventional of forms: There is, in Apollinaire, a sense of discretion which bears in mind the abilities of the reader and bends the whole poem to the end of communication and pleasure.
Apollinaire had a genuinely poetic mind in the sense defined by T. Eliot in an essay on 'The Metaphysical Poets' first published in When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular and fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of his typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
Introduction 35 When the poetic mind is eager to record and illuminate human experience as was Apollinaire's, then the resulting poetry will be fresh and will bring a new direction to lyricism. Apollinaire's ambition was to please, to explore and to communicate with as wide a range of readers as possible: Ventre affame n'a pas d'oreilles Et les convives mastiquaient a qui mieux mieux Ah!
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Je vous expliquerai la genese de ce poeme de fin d'amour. En j'ai eu pour une jeune fille qui etait peintre un gout esthetique qui confinait a Padmiration et participe encore de ce sentiment. Elle m'aimait ou le croyait et je crus ou plutot m'efforcai de 1'aimer, car je ne 1'aimais pas alors. Nous n'etions connus en ce temps-la ni 1'un ni 1'autre et je commensais mes meditations et ecrits esthetiques qui devaient avoir une influence en Europe et meme ailleurs.
Je puis dire que je fis mon possible pour faire partager mon admiration a 1'univers. Elle voulait que nous nous mariions ce que je ne voulus jamais, cela dura jusqu'en ou elle ne m'aima plus. C'etait fini, mais tant de temps passe ensemble, tant de souvenirs communs, tout cela s'en allant j'en eus une angoisse que je pris pr sic de 1'amour et je souffris jusqu'au moment de la guerre T. This account of the poem as a 'poeme de fin d'amour' belies the wider spread of its themes in which the lament for love is overshadowed by a nostalgia for lost youth, for a dead faith and by a deep sense of alienation.
From the beginning on a sunny morning when a contemporary Paris breathes a confident optimism in the future, the climate and atmosphere of the poem darken into a growing depression where lost love, death, youth and a wasted life are mirrored in the other face of the urban present: The alarms occasioned by Apollinaire's arrest on suspicion of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in followed by the end of his love-affair with Marie Laurencin, the woman referred to in the letter quoted above, were twin crises which brought about the revaluation of his situation.
The poem is a kind of balance sheet in which the poet takes a hard, disabused look at his life and his art. If'La Chanson du mal-aime' has hope concealed in its epigraph and in the conclusion that, if suffering is the lifeblood of art, then art has the power to transcend it, there are no such consolations in 'Zone'. The poem ranges widely in space over the scenes of Apollinaire's life and, in time, from his early youth to the present when, as a man of 32, he looks back on his life.
An early version of the poem, entitled 'Cri', is published by M. Gabrielle Picabia has described in an article 'Apollinaire', Transition, 6, 50 how she was joined in the autumn of by Apollinaire, Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in a big farmhouse in the Jura where she was staying. Apollinaire, with his customary avid curiosity, fell in love with the region and its customs; 'Its borderland, known as "the Zone", had obtained, thanks to Voltaire, a certain relaxation of customs restrictions which still obtained', wrote Gabrielle Picabia and it was here, when reading an extract to his friends, that Apollinaire decided to call the poem 'Zone'.
Zjone is also the name given to that indeterminate area lying outside the former walls of Paris which is neither town nor country. Its discontinuity in time, space and thematic emphasis is marked; the range of images is vast and the registers of style vary considerably. As in James Joyce's Ulysses there is a formal unity of time since the poem covers a span from morning to the following dawn, unity of place as the poem 'happens' in Paris, and a certain unity of action since the poem concerns one man's investigation of himself.
But time is overridden, the poet's mind covers Europe, the themes multiply. The search for identity is central, the constant centrality of the poet is the strong thread that binds the poem together. There is also an overall dramatic tension caused by the original use of the pronouns je and tu. These two voices are absent in the original version which is written in the first person. The careful elaboration of an interior dialogue with the attribution of a series of comments and questions to a voice using the pronoun tu and responses by a voice using je heightens dramatically the inner meaning of the poem and makes more searching the quest.
Of course, both are the voices of the poet but they are subtly distinguished one from the other: The dialogue cuts into single lines as in There is certainly a similarity of content—the errance, the cast of prostitutes, Jews, Poles, the quest for a faith, the ending in bleak despair.
The differences are more important: On the relationships between the two poets, see M. Poupon, Apollinaire et Cendrars Archives des Lettres modernes, 2, , Samuel Beckett has done a magnificent translation of the poem; published without signature in Transition, 50, 6, it has now been issued separately Dublin, Dolmen Press; London, Calder and Boyars, Apollinaire reduced the tone of some of the lines originally composed for the poem. An earlier version of the first line read: The image is a surprising and pleasing combination of the traditional pastoral scene reinterpreted in modern terms.
Port-Aviation was the airfield near Paris. Its functional architecture is contrasted with that of Tantiquit6 grecque et romaine'. An earlier version read: Mais j'ai perdu 1'habitude de croire et la honte me retient. Note the change of person. An allusion to the growing interest in poster art which had been given a considerable impetus by Toulouse-Lautrec.
Les dernieres recherches
In , in an article entitled 'La peinture moderne' Apollinaire noted that 'dans une ville moderne, 1'inscription, 1'enseigne, la publicite jouent un role artistique tres important' O. Apollinaire's art was open to the chance encounters of everyday life and, in this respect, was an important influence on Surrealism. An earlier version of this line read: The brightness and freshness of the street recall nostalgically the past. The passage recounting previous religious experience has been considerably extended Blue and white are the traditional colours of the Virgin Mary.
Scott Bates points out in the glossary to his Guillaume Apollinaire that the amethyst was the 'symbol of divinity, of crucifixion, in medieval lapidaries, cabbalistic works'. The double potence is the Cross. The Star of David is six-pointed. These lines bring to an end the first part of the poem which, with its inter-linked themes of regret for a youthful acceptance of religious faith now lost and an admiration for the brash vigour of twentieth-century life in a sunlit industrial scene, marks a movement of ascent, culminating in the fantastic volley of images of flight and transcendance.
These lines are obscure. The 'il' of 'il sait y faire'—an unexpected colloquial phrase—refers to 'siecle'. Simon Magus is, by legend, gifted with the power of flight. The catalogue of legendary fliers continues. Icare is Icarus, the son of Daedalus, the Athenian craftsman of enormous skill who fashioned with wax and feathers, wings for himself and Icarus to enable them to escape from exile in Crete. Icarus flew too near the sun so that the wax melted and he fell to his death in the sea.
Icarus is a figure who carries much symbolic weight for Apollinaire since he represents the human urge to confront the impossible, as well as being a creature of man's Commentaries pp. In a letter Apollinaire wrote: Je me demande pourquoi dans cette terminologie de 1'aviation si incertaine encore, on n'a pas songe a rendre un hommage verbal a Icare. De son nom on aurait pu tirer des mots. Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagorean philospher, was believed to have the power of making miracles. L'oiseau Roc is the fabled bird of the Thousand and One Nights.
The dove is a symbol of the Holy Ghost. The movement of descent begins here with Apollinaire's memories crowding in on him. The city takes on a different aspect of sordid horror and the poet, instead of being one with the crowded, sunny streets, plunges into a darker reality in which he feels totally isolated.
The darkness of the picture is fitfully lit by flames. Far from being entirely a poem 'de fin d'amour', this is the first mention of Tangoisse de 1'amour' in the poem. The more violent lines of the earlier version continued: The Church of the Sacre-Cceur is on the butte at Montmartre. The nature of this love is made unambigously clear in the draft for the line is followed by: G'est une enflure ignoble dont je souhaite etre gueri Elie me tient eVeille" jusqu'au matin dans mon lit Elie me fait mourir d'un sic voluptueuse angoisse.
There is no Baudelairean guilt to be found in Apollinaire's frank celebrations of carnal love but if these lines are to be taken in conjunction with the following 'Si tu vivais dans 1'ancien temps tu entrerais dans un monastere' it could reflect Apollinaire's temporary rejection of love combined with a regret for past happiness which dates from before puberty.
Memories of his past flood in on him, some treated solemnly, some with humour, all with a sense of understanding compassion. Natives of Nice, Menton and La Turbie. The fish is an early symbol of Christ. The rose-beetle in the heart of the rose prefigures the flaws in Apollinaire's experience of love. During a visit to the church of Saint-Vit in Prague, Apollinaire thought he discerned in the flaws of a precious stone, the delineation of a mad face which resembled his own.
His superstitious nature never forgot this. The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter of Prague travelled anti-clockwise. The Hradcany, a royal palace in Prague. Reference to his arrest on suspicion of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in A veiled reference to his love affairs with Annie Playden and Marie Laurencin. After this line the original version had the couplet: Je me sens abandonne sur terre depuis mon plus jeune age Je n'ose pas me confier a 1'dtoile comme les rois mages and 1.
Je n'ose plus regarder la croix. These explicit regrets for a lost faith are merged into a less direct lamentation. The sense of isolation is apparent and the chronicle of wandering becomes an errance having as its aim the realisation of identity. The lines lead naturally into a description of the emigrant Jews for whose life-style Apollinaire had an enduring interest and sympathy. The original version was considerably longer and contained a section on expatriate Poles: Et moi en qui se mele le sang slave et le sang latin Je regarde ces pauvres Polonais qui revent aux jours lointains Aux jours ou la Pologne e"tait un grand royaume On y cultivait les lettres, on y formait des hommes but once again Apollinaire covered his tracks by omission.
Apollinaire owned a red eiderdown which his mother had given him and which he transported into his various habitations. Before this line a list of social outcasts and misfits is omitted in order to give a tighter construction revolving around the central figure of the poet. The horror of the night figures vanishes as the dawn comes but the poet is left alone having passed through hope and defeat into final resignation.
Lines do not appear in the brouillon. Although Pascal Pia suggests that the name Ferdine comes from a licentious novel Une Nuit d'orgies a Saint-Pierre-Martinique Pilkington plausibly argues that the names Ferdine and Le"a are employed for their alliterative values. Apollinaire moved to Auteuil in October An exhibition of Iberian or pre-Spanish sculpture held in the Louvre in and which was said to have a great influence on Picasso and the Cubists , is a proof of the interest in the Paris of that time in primitive art forms.
Apollinaire, in common with other writers and painters of his time had collected such objets d'art. In this context however they are seen as symbols of religions which have decayed and died. The sad exclusion contained in 'Adieu Adieu' prepares for the despair of the decapitated sun. The sun is a generalised symbol of hope and rebirth in Alcools and its death, implying the denial of both, closes the poem on a note of unadulterated gloom.
De"caudin has discovered the refrain in a manuscript dating from Apollinaire's imprisonment in September Dans une fosse comme un ours Chaque matin je me promene Tournons, tournons, tournons toujours Quand done finira la semaine Quand done finiront les amours Vienne la nuit sonne 1'heure Les jours s'en vont et je demeure Doss. Mario Roques has found similarities of rhyme and rhythm with a thirteenth-century spinning song—'Gaite et Oriour. The inexorable movement of events passing by the man fixed in unhappiness is brilliantly conveyed by the refrain and the structure of the poem whose first line is also its last.
Lines 2 four syllables and 3 six syllables formed one decasyllabic line in the original printed version giving a stanza of three decasyllabics on one feminine rhyme. The dismembering of the single line into two lines of unequal length displays a more interesting visual pattern and, with the suppression of punctuation, gives a more fluid and ambiguous movement to the poem.