Tamed Realism and Surrealism in Graves’ and Apollinaire’s Visual Poetry(Calligrammes and Imagery that Emerged out of War Poetry)
Author: Jenis John Rumao, University of Mumbai
The following essay will explore the not-so-renowned war poets of the 18th Century – Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Graves. A brief introduction to both poets is given, their individual experiences in the war are recounted, and finally, their preoccupation with the macabre conditions that led to an emergence of poet soldiers, is explored through their forms of poetry.
War poetry is known to be dominated by British poets, but there exist many voices from the trenches, which remain unheard. The individual experience of every soldier was different during the first world war. Although the unfamiliarity about these poems remains, much of the war poetry from France, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere is of equal quality to (and, in some cases, even better than) that produced by British writers (Clayton, 2020). Guillaume Apollinaire was one such poet who survived the trenches of the First World War (Marlowe, 2020).
Subtitled “Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916”, many of Apollinaire’s poems deal with his wartime experience as both an artilleryman and infantry officer. He was badly hurt in 1916 with a shrapnel wound to his temple and it was during his recovery that he coined the word “sur-realism” in the notes for the ballet Parade. Although he recovered, the injury weakened him. Apollinaire became one of the many victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Published in the year of his death, Calligrammes remains one of the most influential books of the twentieth century (2020). In this assignment, I am going to analyse two of his calligrammes – ‘The Necktie and the Watch’ and ‘Cotton in the Ears’.
Robert Von Ranke Graves who was a native British, spent his childhood in Germany, wanted to fight in the trenches, but his position of privilege did not allow him to be in the trench warfare. Some of his poems, however, demonstrate his will to fight in the trenches. I will be exploring two of Graves’ poems namely, The Caterpillar and A Dead Boche.
In September 1917, Graves was seconded for duty with a garrison battalion. Graves's army career ended dramatically with an incident which could have led to a charge of desertion. Posted to Limerick in late 1918, he says “I woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza.” “I decided to make a run for it,” he wrote, “I should at least have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish, hospital.”
Both Graves and Apollinaire were afflicted with the Spanish Influenza, the fact that Graves had a chance to talk about it, places him in a position of privilege over other soldiers who died of the influenza. This is explored in Graves’ - The Caterpillar.
Apollinaire’s collection Calligrammes stands as a landmark achievement in the development of literary modernism. The book’s title refers to Apollinaire’s visual poetry, which attempted to achieve with words what Picasso and others had been doing in fine art. His poem “Du Coton dans les Oreilles” (Cotton in Your Ears) begins by re-creating the explosion of artillery shells typographically, the words tumbling upwards on the page. (Marlowe, 2020):
So many explosives about to be ALIVE
Write a single word if you dare,
The points of impact in my soul continually at war,
Your fierce flock spits out fire,
OMEGAphone.
(Figure.1 "Cotton in the Ears (Du Coton dans les Oreilles)." Apollinaire, Calligrammes. (Bleu) online image)
Du Coton dans les Oreilles is a ‘calligraph’ by Apollinaire, here the poetic persona creates a mise en scene of the war of the second battle of Champagne. The Calligramme not only has a distinct shape, but it is also a distinct form of poetry. The visual poetry marks an epoch in the history of war poetry. Guillaume looks at the war rather non-fatally. His sur-realism, is highlighted in poems such as this one, where there is no mention of death or macabre, but an internal war within him, a wish to stop the war, perhaps this is why he was known as an aggressive modernist. The poem ‘Du Coton dans les Oreilles’ or ‘The Cotton in the Ears,’ makes a reader read both upwards and downwards, forcing the reader to experience the kind of ups and downs a soldier goes through in a cacophonous battlefield.
“The poet delights in playing with the hapless reader by creating a constant tension between…the two elements forces the reader to read backwards or upwards, and other poems make him follow the sentences around circles, down lines letter by letter, or across diagonals…” an experiment of the visual form incorporates immediate experience in their poetry, these are the “written signs of an idea” “signs of specific objects,” rather than an abstraction of ideas in the poem, which is the normal way of reading. (Hellerstein, 1977) The poet persona is not ready for the explosives about to be alive, he is aware of the consequences the war will have, yet he dares to express about it in writing, he challenges the readers if they could understand anything or even dare to write about the very experience of being in a war. The War in the backdrop is the Second Battle of Champagne, a French offensive against the invading German army.(Lukasik, 2020) The poet tries finding a voice amid the political and cultural tension. Even though he is on one side of the war, he culturally belongs to the other. “Apollinaire was Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice” (Apollinaire et al.) A dilemma of fighting for a land, one does not belong to. “The explosives about to be Alive” bring out fear and humiliation. ‘The points of impact in my soul continually at war’ shows the poet’s struggle – a rejection of one’s existence in the world outside of war. Spitting out fire from the war symbolises the hatred created by warmongers and how his fellow troop members have helplessly become a part of it.
Apollinaire felt that the war represented a new era, one that would require an original language. As he writes in “Victoire”: “. . . the old languages are so close to death/It’s really from habit and cowardice/That we still use them for poetry”. His visual style was an attempt at a new language, and one could argue that this experimentation has had a more lasting literary influence than the conventional, ornate poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Laurence Binyon or Robert Graves ("Poetry As Enchantment – Dana Gioia, 2015") it is likely that Apollinaire’s writing is inaccessible due to this new experimentation with the poetic form. Even though his poems are available in the Public Domain, there is a lack of enough translation of his work from French to English language.
LA CRAVATE ET LA MONTRE
À Édouard Férot
LA TE
C VA
RA
DOU
LOU
REUSE
QUE TU
PORTES
ET QUI T '
ORNE O CI
VILISÉ
OTE- TU VEUX
LA BIEN
SI RESPI
RER
MME L
CO 'ON
S'A SE
MU
BI
EN
les la
heures
et le beau
vers Mon
dantesque coeur té
luisant et
cadavérique de
la
le bel les
inconnu Il yeux vie
est Et
- tout pas
5 se
les Muses en ra se
aux portes de fin fi
ton corps ni l'enfant la
dou
l'infini leur
redressé Agia
par un fou de
de philosophe
mou
rir
semaine la main
Tireis
Translation of La Cravate et la Montre:
(The Tie and the Watch.)
The painful tie you are wearing oh civilised one,
take it off if you wish to breathe well
What fun we are having
Hours
my heart
eyes
the child
Agia
the hand
Tiresis
week
the infinite propped by a mad philosopher
the Muses at the doors of your body
the stately stranger
and the shiny, dantesque cadaverous worm.
(« La Cravate Et La Montre » translation acquired from a blog website)
In yet another calligramme of Apollinaire, (La Cravate Et La Montre. Vivelapoésie) he uses the necktie and the watch as symbols of civilization, which are far from the war scenarios, the poet disregards civilization and tends to focus on the anarchy he has come across due to the war, challenging the dogmas in the society of the early 20th century. The poem reads from right to left beginning and ending at the top of the circular clock, it is a rewinding dial symbolising a lifetime. The pointer rods end the poem, pointing at the top of the watch/ montre.
One critique emphasises on his visual poetry “Individual metaphoric usage of Guillaume Apollinaire, diachronic view of the metaphorical development in Calligrammes during 1914-16 from early cliché to mature love lyric, does reveal some signs of the same movement away from aestheticism which inspired the English poets towards a greater involvement with the human concerns of Mankind at war and consequently to a richer, wiser and tougher poetry. The aesthetic failure of the alternative French and German responses, which were largely ones of passivity and acceptance, is seen less as a product of personal talent, than as a direct result of national attitudes to the social and political valuation of the individual.” (Wilson)
This poem, though it talks about the grim realities of war, it focuses on the bright side of life too, a term that Apollinaire coined was ‘sur-réaliste’ , the verse best explaining this is : “La beauté de vivre passe la douleur de mourir,” the beauty of life is beyond the pain in dying. Poems of Apollinaire have achieved the feat of “liberation of objects from their normal contexts.” The poet emphasizes the main idea that time is limited, and one must not waste it being conformed. (Vivelapoésie, 2013) Guillaume’s poetry has therefore been a tool for interpretation and a criticism on not only traditional values, but also a criticism of the traditional form of poetry. (Heep, 1993)
Robert Graves’, ‘The Caterpillar’, sets a mocking tone throughout the poem. This simple yet profound poem, deals with the theme of death in a light-hearted manner. The caterpillar is looked upon as a nonchalant viewer of mortality, (its acceptance of life as it is its nonchalance towards cessation of life). The caterpillar goes on to eat hawthorn till it dies. The hawthorn here, is considered inauspicious, as its smell is associated with the plague. Hawthorn signifies death and sickness. This death and sickness denote the life of the trench soldiers during the influenza.
Both Graves and Apollinaire were infected by the ‘Spanish Flu’ also known as the ‘the forgotten plague/ Spanish influenza’. The flu’s spread and lethality was enhanced by the cramped conditions of soldiers and poor wartime nutrition that many people were experiencing during World War I (Jarus) Apollinaire succumbed to this very phenomenon, whereas Graves is able to express it in his poetry.
Under this loop of honeysuckle,1
A creeping, coloured caterpillar,2
I gnaw the fresh green hawthorn spray,3
I nibble it leaf by leaf away.4 (Graves)
The caterpillar overlooks the implication of this eating. Graves' poems contain the abstraction that Apollinaire’s Calligrammes fail to touch upon. “The caterpillar years” , which is Graves’ another poem, refers to caterpillars as Tanks in the war. The caterpillar here consumes, ignoring the repercussions of the death, just as a soldier continues fighting in the war, ignoring the devastating implications of war.
Down beneath grow dandelions, 5
Daisies, old-man's-looking-glasses; 6
Rooks flap croaking across the lane. 7
I eat and swallow and eat again 8
The caterpillar’s incapability of looking at the innocence and beauty of dandelions and daisies lies in the fact that albeit the death that lurks around it, it is simply doing its job of eating the leaf to make a cocoon. The cocoon is mentioned as a green mausoleum, as a place to retreat indicating an acceptance of death.
When I'm old, tired, melancholy, 13
I'll build a leaf-green mausoleum14
Close by, here on this lovely spray,15
And die and dream the ages away.16
And yet after the proclamation of death, the caterpillar neglects the thought of an afterlife or a redemption. This highlights the mechanical and monotonous life lead by the caterpillar, which in turn is the life of the soldiers at war, after having experienced the war-life, a sense of passivity comes in even after they have returned alive from the war, which is picked upon in the verses:
Some say worms win resurrection, 17
With white wings beating flitter-flutter, 18
But wings or a sound sleep, why should I care?19
I'll miss my share.20
Similarly, the fallen enemy in Robert Graves's poem 'A Dead Boche' (1917) has no face, no name, no heroic attribute, not even any human attributes anymore (Lessenich). A dehumanising factor is brought forth in the description of an enemy- A German, who is supposedly to be despised by the poet, but the poet ends up empathising with the ‘Boche’. The words ‘a certain cure for lust and blood’ is an incitement that has been perhaps brought by the warmongers, the poet seems to hate the very notion of it when he says “War’s Hell!”, this kind of a hate was also mentioned above in Guillaume’s cacophonous description of war. Their life if portrayed by a kind of a dance would be a ‘Danse macabre’ lived if they survive the end of a war. ( Camille Saint-Saëns “Danse Macabre”)
A Dead Boche
TO you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
"War's Hell!" and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood: 6
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche: he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.12
Aforementioned poems of Graves are devoid of divine nature, and they capture the extremeness of experiences. Graves’ shock erupted into verse later in his life, after he had faced the war, his early poems however are known to be about childhood and innocence, such as in the following verses:
“Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of the evening sky.
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by”
These soldier poets were the first to experience the radical innovations, the breakdown of the old forms and norms of warfare as mirroring the final breakdown of all the crumbling forms and norms, that 'Crisis of European Civilization' (Lessenich, 2020) which shattered all the brittle traditional beliefs. They experienced the War as a meaningless gap in time and history, raising their very personal and subjective experience to the rank of a general philosophy. They belonged to what Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway called “the lost generation”. Their pitiful or angry exposure of the absurdity of the Great War, as revealing the absurdity of life and death in general, proved a signal contribution to the breakthrough of literary 'Modernism’.
Both Apollinaire and Graves convey the appalling conditions of War in their poems, in the process of doing so they were able to create a poetic form of their own. Apollinaire’s poems echo the Symbolists and anticipate the work of the Surrealists, which paved a way in modern poetry. However, Graves began as a typical Georgian poet, his “war experiences and the difficulties of his personal life gave his later poetry a much deeper and a painful note. He remained a traditionalist rather than a modernist.” (Britannica, 2020)
In conclusion, the exploration of war poetry, encompassing renowned poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Graves, sheds light on the multifaceted nature of human experience amidst conflict. Beyond the dominant narrative of British war poets, voices from diverse backgrounds and cultures offer unique perspectives on the macabre conditions of war. Through their poignant verses, these poet soldiers capture the raw emotions, harrowing realities, and profound impacts of warfare, transcending borders and languages and even traditional forms.
Reflecting on the rich tapestry of war poetry, we are reminded of the enduring power of art to illuminate the darkest corners of the human experience and inspire empathy, understanding, and hope for a future free from the ravages of war.
References:
· "La Cravate Et La Montre". Vivelapoésie, 2013, https://vivelapoesie.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/la-cravate-et-la-montre/. Accessed 19 Sept 2020.
· "Poetry as Enchantment – Dana Gioia". Danagioia.Com, 2015, http://danagioia.com/essays/american-poetry/poetry-as-enchantment/. Accessed 19 Sept 2020.
· “Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918).” The Public Domain Review, publicdomainreview.org/collection/apollinaire-s-calligrammes-1918.
· « La Cravate Et La Montre » - Everything2.Com". Everything2.Com, https://everything2.com/title/La+cravate+et+la+montre. Accessed 20 Sept 2020.
· Apollinaire, Guillaume et al. “Calligrammes (1913-1916)”. Goodreads.Com, 2020, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/275510.Calligrammes. Accessed 20 Sept 2020.
· Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Onde.” Calligrammes : Poèmes De La Paix Et De La Guerre, edited by Mercvre De France, Mercvre De France, 1918, pp. 50–167. PERKINS LIBRARY Duke Universîty. Rare Books
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· Clayton, Owen. "Guillaume Apollinaire To Sarojini Naidu: The War Poets You Don’t Study at School". Newstatesman.Com, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/guillaume-apollinaire-sarojini-naidu-war-poets-you-don-t-study-school. Accessed 19 Sept 2020.
· Das, Santanu. Reframing First World War Poetry. British library article,2014.https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/reframing-first-world-war-poetry.Accessed 20 sept 2020.
· Graves, Robert. "The Caterpillar, with an Annotation''. Genius.Com, 2020, https://genius.com/Robert-graves-the-caterpillar-annotated. Accessed 20 Sept 2020.
· Heep, Hartmut. “Apollinaire's Visual Poetry: The Case of ‘La Cravate Et La Montre.’ ” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 24, 1993, pp. 87–98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40836727. Accessed 21 Sept. 2020.
· Hellerstein, Nina S. Paul Claude! And Guillaume Apollinaire As Visual Poets : L’idéogrammes Occidentaux And Calligrammes. Merald E., 2020, pp. 246, 260, 263,266. 1977 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/11.3/paul-claudel-and-guillaume-apollinaire-as-visual-poets.pdf. Accessed 19 Sept 2020.
· In the Trenches: Marc Bloch, Robert Graves, And the Individual Experience of French and British Soldiers During WWI. mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1207&context=colaconf.
· Jarus, Owen. "20 Of the Worst Epidemics and Pandemics in History". Livescience.Com, 2020, https://www.livescience.com/worst-epidemics-and-pandemics-in-history.html. Accessed 20 Sept 2020.
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