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Rating: Few symbols fascinate me as much as the Bridge.
We are all in continuous change and transformation: we leave behind patches of land, jobs, loves, and seasons of our lives, to arrive at new ones. In the middle, there is it, the Bridge, a sort of space-time suspension of our existences where everything seems possible, attainable, and desirable because the other shore has not yet been reached and we, suspended in the void and fantasizing about the unknown, load our “rebirth” with expectations.
In French poetry, exactly in the middle of the extreme decline of Symbolism and Decadence of the late nineteenth century and the birth of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century (Dadaism and Surrealism), appeared Guillaume Apollinaire; his first book of poems, “Alcools”, appeared; a Bridge appeared.
Extravagant and contradictory character, half Italian and half Polish, this authentic son of the “Belle Epoque” managed, over time, to become the gravitational center of the intellectual and creative life of Paris, grasping all aspects of the historical period, both the lasting and the more fleeting and intransmissible ones: from the naive faith in technical and scientific development, to the momentum and search for new artistic forms; from the exaltation of the "terrestrial journey" of every human being, to the ironic and detached taste with which one discussed fashions, customs, and passions.
“Alcools”, published in 1913, is a sort of intimate and personal diary in which Apollinaire, a poet of vagabond and hedonistic nature, tirelessly blends fairy-tale anecdote with linguistic preciousness, the image of everyday life with learned citation, medieval legend with the most sparkling humor. The abundance of inspirational sources and the formal quest for poetic expression (with the use of free verse and the elimination of punctuation for example), might suggest meditated and elaborated compositions by an austere critical consciousness as happened in Mallarmé, but it is not so. For their willful, boisterous, and improvisational energy, Apollinaire’s poems seem to be unpredictable vortices in which the author manages to coexist heterogeneous and irreconcilable elements, making bold shifts in perspective and variations of pathos.
At the beginning, I spoke of Bridge because in this “perpetual creative hilarity” (as Mario Luzi defined it), a certain melancholy typical of Verlaine or a certain inclination towards the raw and “urban” symbol of Baudelaire can certainly be traced; but in Apollinaire there is never a complete immersion in the symbol, there is always a certain amused and pleased detachment that lightens the tension.
Finally, he is to be considered, at least formally, perhaps the most important precursor of Surrealism, but within certain limits: if it is true that his versoliberismo and some “automatic writing” processes have certainly influenced Breton and his disciples, it is equally true that Apollinaire always dealt with “earthly journeys”, he dealt with this world. Surrealism sought an “elsewhere” and wanted to create new, unknown worlds, and perhaps, precisely for this tendency, at a substantial level, the most direct predecessors of this artistic movement were the mysticism and hermeticism of Rimbaud, Lautréamont.
In “Alcools” we see a man wandering through the city: his “dispersive efflorescence” that makes every single detail he sees in the streets attractive to him, is intertwined with a deep desire to “return” inside himself, to give meaning to things. Every bizarre and extravagant impulse toward the outside is balanced by an immense attention to what is happening in his own spirit. Almost as if Syd Barrett and Nick Drake had decided to record an album together.
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