Alcools: Guillaume Apollinaire

by Claude Morhange-Bégué, Pierre Lartigue

Tous les outils pour comprendre et maîtriser le recueil poétique Alcools, au programme du nouveau bac français.
 
• Une lecture accompagnée des poèmes
• Des clés pour analyser  :
– le contexte, 
– les différents thèmes et procédés,
– la visée de l’œuvre…
 

Genres: French Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Myriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fait le job!

[Bob Woodley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very short and superficial. Sort of a french Cliff Notes. As you'd expect from the title. And I did expect it.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a little book I have been carrying around with me for almost 50 years -- copyright date says 1972, and I must have bought it right around then. I think I thought the books in this series (Profil d'une Oeuvre) were glorified French Cliff Notes. I was wrong.

This is a very quick summary (about 80 pages) of this influential collection by Apollinaire. Begue summarizes critical attitudes and techniques and ties them to the poems. He establishes a context -- historically, biographically, linguistically -- for the work. Maybe because I had to read it so slowly (it took me as long to read 80 pages of criticism in French as it takes me to read a 500 page novel!), I filled the books with notes.

There are many aspects to Begue's discussion that startled me, but perhaps the one I enjoyed the most was right at the end. So many contemporary American poets have talked about "surprise" in a poem and they seem to think this idea is new. Here's a quote from Begue (in my very quick and uncertain translation): "Surprise is the great spring of the new. It is by surprise, by its important place that he has given to. surprise that the new spirit distinguishes itself from all artistic movements and from the literature that preceded it." Begue is quoting someone else, perhaps another critic? And here, even closer to the end, talking in particular about "Zone," he says that "the poet juxtaposes entire phrases or groups of phrases, without any apparent connection ... forcing the reader to find their rapport, to derive from their contiguous position on the page a continuous logic or at least a spiritual satisfaction, such as the reader must refind for himself the essence of the metaphoric process." This seems to me just exactly what we have come to call "association" in contemporary American poetry. And here it is in Apollinaire, very clearly, around 1910!