Published a few months before his death in 1918, Calligrammes was Guillaume Apollinaire’s final collection of poems, bringing together a dazzlingly varied body of work which spanned both the insouciant days preceding the outbreak of war and the horrors of the trenches, and combined radical poetic experimentation with repeated nods to the traditional love lyric. The collection is best known for its visual experimentation: the term “calligramme” is generally understood to refer to visual poems, and more specifically to “shaped” poems which are laid out on the page so as to visually represent particular objects (very often the objects verbally described in the poems themselves). But while the collection contains a number …
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Citation: Shingler, Katherine. "Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913-1916)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 May 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11498, accessed 24 November 2024.]
