A Joyful Meeting of Playful Poets

One of Guillaume Apollinaire's closest friends, André Billy—among Apollinaire's multitude of allies from the literary and art worlds of France—remembered the celebrated author of Alcools and the very coiner of the word surrealism in the following manner: "Whenever I saw him, I wanted to rush up to him and laugh. Life was suddenly wonderful." It was Apollinaire who predicted, in his initial definition of surrealism, that a "New Spirit" would "bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness."

This joyful aesthetic leader of all things avant-garde and ludic was born in Rome to a Polish mother of minor royal descent and an Italian father purported to have been an army officer from a well-to-do family, even if the latter remained unknown to the celebrated author. Apollinaire immigrated to France in his teens with his mother and brother, assuming, at the age of nineteen, the pen name under which he would write and eventually become one of the great French litterateurs of the early twentieth century. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes would say of Apollinaire: "He was at the center of his time like a spider at the center of its web." Having never fully recovered from a head wound received in wwi, for which he enthusiastically enrolled to prove his "Frenchness," Apollinaire died of influenza at the very end of the war—after which another friend would write to the recognized champion of surrealism, André Breton: "[Apollinaire] marks an epoch. The beautiful things we can do now!" Indeed Apollinaire was a principal catalyst in liberating the arts from status-quo platitudes, keeping alive Cézanne's earlier taunt "burn the Louvre"; and his colorful spirit would continue to influence avant-garde initiatives for decades to follow.

It is not surprising that an equally "joyful" and ludic contemporary poet such as X. J. Kennedy (whom Sonny Williams has dubbed "the poet of play" and whose "joy of rhythm . . . [and] of rhyme" Donald Hall has lauded)—who studied at the Sorbonne and who translated Ronsard, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Desnos, and other Apollinairian poems—would be attracted to the playfully cerebral verse in a work like the illustrated Bestiaire, ou cortège d'Orphée, Apollinaire's first book of poems published in 1911. The volume features a procession of some twenty-five creatures of the animal world, escorted along the way by the mythological "father of song," Orpheus (with whom Apollinaire felt a particular affinity and whose creative impulses inspired "Orphism," another "-ism" of Apollinaire's coinage). Orpheus appears four times throughout the poetic parade and is succeeded in his fourth and final appearance by the tempting Sirens, whose own song will have already been neutralized by Orpheus's preventive warning, allowing for the Dove, Peacock, Owl, Ibis, and Ox to bring up the rear. Notwithstanding an exception or two, it has also been pointed out that Orpheus's four appearances divide Apollinaire's animal kingdom into mammals, insects, water creatures, and finally birds, before breaking the pattern and ending the book with a seemingly autobiographical Oxen figure (a "grand" being, as the qualifier might apply both literally and figuratively to Apollinaire) who closes the procession with a hopeful heavenly vision of an eternal reunion of friends among the angels.

Though an alphabetical ordering by the first letter of each animal is not attempted, Apollinaire does respect the rich French tradition of illustrated bestiaries reaching back to the beautifully illuminated examples of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, themselves inspired by even earlier illustrated manuscripts featuring creatures of the natural world. Among Apollinaire's many artist friends, with whom he worked on manifestos and about whose artwork he wrote in steady contributions to art journals (Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Picabia, and Duchamp, to name but a few), he finally chose Raoul Dufy to provide woodcut engravings for his bestiary by virtue of a xylographic process that Dufy had been learning at the École des Beaux-Arts; the artistic novelty derived from...