Calligrammes

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Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, and was first published in 1918. Calligrammes is noted for how the typeface and spatial arrangement of the words on a page plays just as much of a role in the meaning of each poem, as the words themselves - a form called a calligram. In this sense, the collection can be seen as either concrete poetry or visual poetry. Apollinaire described his work as follows:

The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a briliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.

Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy^[1]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Apollinaire, Guillaume, quoted in the preface by Michel Butor, translation by Kyoko. Calligrammes, p. 7 (Éditions Gallimard, preface copyright 1966).

[edit] References

• Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes. Preface by Michel Butor. (Éditions Gallimard, 1995) ISBN 2-07-030008-0