APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. Alcools. Poèmes (1898–1913).

APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. Alcools. Poèmes (1898–1913).Revolutionising Poetry APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. Alcools. Pomes (18981913). [Lyons: E. Arrault et Cie for] Paris: Mercure de France. 1913. 8vo. Publishers printed wrappers with beige caduceus and winged helmet device to upper cover; pp. 204, [2 (colophon, blank)]; with half title and lithographic frontispiece portrait by Pablo Picasso, with tissue guard, winged helmet device to title; small chip to lower cover, slight creasing to spine, a few minute

Revolutionising Poetry

APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. Alcools. Poèmes (1898–1913). [Lyons: E. Arrault et Cie for] Paris: Mercure de France. 1913.

8vo. Publisher’s printed wrappers with beige caduceus and winged helmet device to upper cover; pp. 204, [2 (colophon, blank)]; with half-title and lithographic frontispiece portrait by Pablo Picasso, with tissue guard, winged helmet device to title; small chip to lower cover, slight creasing to spine, a few minute chips to spine subtly repaired, text block slightly coming away from spine at head of last few quires; sporadic light foxing, some browning to last 2 ff.; else a very good copy, partially uncut.

Rare first edition of this pivotal collection of poems by Apollinaire, instrumental in cementing his reputation, with a striking Cubist frontispiece portrait of the author by his friend Picasso, our copy in the original printed wrappers.

Born Wilhelm Apollinaris Kostrowicki in Rome to a Polish–Lithuanian mother, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) moved to Paris c. 1898–1900, where he became a pioneer in Cubist and Modernist circles, befriending the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Rouveyre, Braque, Duchamp, and Metzinger, coining the term ‘Surrealism’ in 1917, seven years before the emergence of Breton’s Manifesto.

Apollinaire had published his first volume of poetry, Le Bestiaire, in 1911, but it is Alcools – the first work in which the poet chose to abandon punctuation entirely – that his reputation rests, along with his typographically experimental Calligrammes of 1918.

After Apollinaire had added the opening poem, ‘Zone’, at the last minute, and changed the name of the collection from Eau de Vie to Alcools in November 1912, printing was completed on 20 April 1913 in a limited edition of 567 numbered examples (nos. 1–23 on Hollande paper), although certain examples ‘of service de presse or those offered by the author have numbers over six hundred’, as here. The copy sent by the author to Emile Verhaeren, for example, was no. 898 (Décaudin, Le dossier d’ ‘Alcools’ (1996), p. 42, trans.); Apollinaire also sent copies to André Gide and Blaise Cendrars, amongst others.

Of the fifty poems contained here, a third are dedicated to individual friends of Apollinaire’s, including Picasso (’Les fiançailles’), Max Jacob (‘Palais’); André Billy, to whom Apollinaire sent copy no. 822 of Alcools ('L’émigrant de Landor Road’); the painter André Derain (‘Rosemonde’); the art critic Félix Fénéon, coiner of the term ‘Neo-Impressionism’ (‘L’ermite’); and the Cubist painter and printmaker Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire’s lover c. 1907–12. Of particular note are ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ (pp. 18–19) and ‘Zone’ (pp. 7–17), the latter shifting between the first and second person and tracing a sunrise-to-sunrise walk through Paris in which the poet–narrator touches on Christianity, Paris’s Jewish district, and immigrants, as well as courtesans, disillusionment, and lost loves. ‘Zone’ also seemingly includes an allusion to Apollinaire’s arrest in 1911, when he was falsely accused of stealing the Mona Lisa (p. 14). The resulting week he spent in prison would become his inspiration for ‘A la Santé’ (pp. 178–83).

OCLC finds nine copies in North America (Getty, Harvard, Indiana, MoMa, Northwestern, NYPL, Université de Montréal, UT Austin, and Yale), and only one in the UK (BL).

Connolly, The Modern Movement 22.

SKU: 2124592