Guillaume Apollinaire’s Curiosities

This chapter explores Guillaume Apollinaire’s experiments with the material culture of the trenches, ranging from his articles and poems on war objects such as the Frisian horse to the decorative items he carved out of war debris. On and off the page, these experiments disarmed the deadly objects of an industrial conflict, turning them into peculiar products of everyday life at the front. I argue that this reappropriating impulse also underwrote Apollinaire’s engagement with the trench press: tattered magazines and shoddily produced booklets handprinted in the war zone. My reading focuses on two poems in his trench volume Case d’Armons , ‘1915’ and ‘Postcard’. Through a collage aesthetic – both poems are linked by a military postcard glued into the volume – the poet playfully subverted the everyday and military connotations of this print artefact, making the volume as a whole into what he termed a ‘bibliographical curiosity’.

Art · Historical and Literary Studies · Renaissance Literature and Culture