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Robert Chandler writes: One of the first of Apollinaire’s poems to make a lasting impression on me was ‘Merveille de la Guerre’. This was unlike anything I had ever read before. Apollinaire’s ecstatic description of the beauty of a night sky lit up by shell-fire and flares is entirely convincing, but deeply shocking to anyone who – like me at the time – unconsciously expects all war poetry to be like Wilfred Owen’s. I now see this poem as a supreme example of Apollinaire’s ability to give free rein to his imagination without ever losing touch with reality. I was shocked simply by the vividness with which Apollinaire registers a sad truth: that beauty and violence can live side by side. The battlefield did indeed have its moments of beauty and – as Norma Rinsler has pointed out in a fine article on Apollinaire’s war poetry(1) – Apollinaire is not the only writer to have noticed this. Wyndham Lewis, for example, has written of the ‘great romantic effects’ of a night bombardment;(2) and the French writer Henri Ghéon described the night sky over the battlefield as ‘the dance of night and the festival of speaking fire’.(3)

Apollinaire’s war poems are still astonishingly unrecognized – even in France. And while many poems from Alcools – even quite slight ones – have been translated into English five or six times, most of the poems from Calligrammes have only been translated once, and few of the poems from the posthumous collections, Poèmes à Lou and Poèmes à Madeleine, seem ever to have been translated at all.

Chronologically, the war poems fall into three groups: those written while Apollinaire was undergoing training in Nîmes, those written while he served in the artillery, and – a smaller group – those written while he served in the infantry. The poems in the first group are for the main part exuberant; for all their naive optimism, they remain deeply touching. Apollinaire’s excitement was shared by millions of people, and it is expressed vividly. Unlike most patriotic poetry of the time, Apollinaire’s never dissolves into abstraction; poems such as ‘At Nîmes’ are full of precisely observed detail.

The second group were written while Apollinaire was serving in the artillery. (. . .) These poems are imbued with wonder, excitement and eroticism. They are not, however, escapist. In the first place, Apollinaire is entirely conscious of his wish to escape. One of his poems to Madeleine ends with the lines:

Are you a goddess like the goddesses the Greeks created so as to feel
less anxious
I worship you O my exquisite goddess even if you live only in my
imagination

Secondly, much of the imagery of even the most wildly erotic poems is derived from the war. It is as if Apollinaire would like to escape into sexual fantasy, but is prevented by the pressure of his day-to-day experience. The intensity of his desire to escape testifies to the depth of the horror he feels.

During his first six months of active service, Apollinaire was a gunner, positioned behind the front line and thus sheltered from the war’s worst horrors. In November 1915 he was transferred, at his own request, to the infantry. After this transfer he wrote of ‘the front line trench whose horror can’t be described, let alone imagined’.4 And in December 1915, in a letter to Madeleine, he wrote: ‘Imagine to what extent one is deprived in trench life of everything that joins you to the universe. One is simply a breast offering itself to the enemy.’ Life in the artillery now seemed like ‘a country picnic, an excursion whose risks aren’t much greater than those of mountaineering.’(5) The mood of the later poems in Calligrammes is correspondingly grimmer. There are still grimmer fragments that Apollinaire seems uncharacteristically to have censored, perhaps afraid that his readers would be uncomprehending. The following lines, for example, were not published during Apollinaire’s lifetime:

Harden yourself old heart hear the piercing cries
Let out by the wounded in agony in the distance
Men lice of the earth O tenacious vermin

The free-verse poems in Calligrammes are remarkable for their imagery, for their visionary power. Many of the rhyming octosyllabics in Alcools are remarkable for the delicacy of their rhythms. It was only while translating this volume that I became aware of the power and depth of a group of poems where Apollinaire’s musical, painterly and intellectual gifts are fused: the short lyrics in Calligrammes. These poems, however, are deceptively simple; I shall finish by discussing ‘Exercise’ in some detail.

Norma Rinsler has written with regard to the later war poems: ‘ The early optimism about a better future was gone. The only way to avoid fear was not to think of the future at all. (. . .) In Exercice (. . .) Apollinaire shows how this attitude detaches a man from life, so that the presence of death becomes less alien. His infantrymen, like Wyndham Lewis’s, hardly notice the shells; like monks they have trained themselves to the patient rhythm of an ascetic life which expects nothing of this world, and thus is not afraid of leaving it.’(6) Wyndham Lewis also served in the artillery and Norma Rinsler is referring here to a passage from his autobiography: ‘More German batteries were firing now, and a number of shells intercepted us. We met an infantry party coming up, about ten men, with earthen faces and heads bowed, their eyes turned inwards as it seemed, to shut out this too-familiar scene. As a shell came rushing down beside them, they did not notice it. There was no sidestepping death if this was where you lived. It was worth our while to prostrate ourselves, when death came over-near. We might escape, in spite of death. But they were its servants. Death would not tolerate that optimistic obeisance from them!’(7) The coincidence between this passage and Apollinaire’s poem is remarkable.