APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume.

£65,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913-1916). First edition, number 25 of 33 copies on Arches paper, exceptionally well-preserved in the original wrappers. Published a few months before Apollinaire's early death, the book collects the poet's calligrams, words arranged into images, alongside his modernist poems and automatic writing.The book sits within a long tradition of typographical experiments in French poetry, whose practitioners include Goncourt, Baudelaire, Gide, and Mallarmé. Written between 1912 and 1916, in Paris before the outbreak of the First World War and in the trenches, the poems are dominated by images of war and also show the influence of Cubism and Futurism. The book, in turn, was an important influence on Surrealism (a word coined by Apollinaire in 1917). "Some of the best war poems in any language are to be found here, together with experiments like 'Les Fenêtres' and 'La Jolie Rousse', which were far ahead of their time" (Connolly).This copy is from the library of the French author and Nobel laureate François Mauriac (1885-1970), with his ink stamp.

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