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Calligrammes

A calligram from Calligrammes

Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913–1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire which 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 "an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph".[1]

Notes

  1. ^ Apollinaire, Guillaume, quoted in the preface by Michel Butor. Calligrammes, p. 7 (Éditions Gallimard, preface copyright 1966).
  2. ^ Action: Cahiers Individualistes De Philosophie Et D’art, October 1920, Blue Mountain Project, Princeton University

References

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