Les combats d’orphée : la poésie de guerre de Guillaume Apollinaire

Abstract

Until late in the twentieth century Apollinaire’s war poems have been underestimated by the majority of French literary critics. After having briefly passed in review the principal reasons for this hostile attitude, the present article proposes a succinct characterization of Apollinaire’s war poetry, by means of an analysis of “Merveille de la guerre” (Wonder of War), one of the most criticized and misunderstood poems.

Keywords

• Calligrams
• Great War
• Orphism
• literary avant-gardism