Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913-1916) [Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916)]

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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 of poems of this type, it also employs a range of other…

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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://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11498, accessed 19 March 2024.]

11498 Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913-1916) 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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