Guillaume Apollinaire
Quick answer: Guillaume Apollinaire craft guide: dropped punctuation, calligrammes, and cinematic jump cuts in verse. What modern poets can steal from Alcools.
Modern poetry has a birth certificate, and Guillaume Apollinaire signed it more than once. Born in Rome in 1880 to a Polish mother, he arrived in Paris and became the ringmaster of the avant-garde: friend and champion of Picasso, defender of Cubism, and the man who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917. His 1913 collection Alcools did something scandalous at the last minute before printing: he removed every punctuation mark, arguing that rhythm and line break were punctuation enough.
He was wounded in the head by shrapnel in the First World War and died in the influenza pandemic two days before the Armistice of 1918, aged thirty-eight. The techniques he left behind still look fresh a century on, which makes him unusually rewarding to study.
Ringmaster of the Paris avant-garde
Apollinaire lived at the exact junction where nineteenth-century lyric met the twentieth-century city. 'Zone', the opening poem of Alcools, walks through Paris mixing Christ with aviators, shepherdesses with the Eiffel Tower, and shifts between 'I' and 'you' for the same speaker. Critics call this simultaneity: the poem behaves like a mind receiving a modern day all at once.
His second major book, Calligrammes (1918), pushed further, arranging words into pictures: a poem about rain printed in trickling diagonal lines, verses shaped like a heart, a fountain, a tie. He subtitled the book 'poems of peace and war', and many were written in the trenches.
The signature moves
The dropped punctuation is the famous one. Without commas and full stops, his lines float and connect in several directions at once, and the reader's breath becomes the grammar. It only works because his line breaks are precise.
Second, the jump cut. Apollinaire moves between images the way early cinema moved between shots, with no connective tissue. A memory of Prague can sit next to a Paris street with nothing but a line break between them, and the collision makes a third meaning.
Third, elegy inside modernity. 'Le Pont Mirabeau' uses an almost folk-song refrain about the Seine flowing under a bridge while love and days run out. The form is old, the nerves are new. Fourth, the visual poem: in Calligrammes the shape of the text is part of its meaning, an idea concrete poetry would build on for the next hundred years.
What you can learn
Try drafting a poem normally, then strip every punctuation mark and repair the confusion using line breaks alone. You will discover instantly which of your breaks were decorative and which were structural. Many poets keep the unpunctuated version; even if you restore commas, your lineation will have improved.
Practise the jump cut separately. List six images from different times and places in your life, then arrange them without any linking phrases such as 'and then' or 'which reminds me'. Trust the reader to leap. Poems built on juxtaposition tend to score well on creativity precisely because they let readers co-create the connections.
Where to start reading
Read 'Zone' first; it repays three readings in a row. Then 'Le Pont Mirabeau' and 'La Chanson du mal-aimé' from Alcools, followed by a browse through Calligrammes for the shaped poems, especially 'Il pleut'. Anne Hyde Greet's and Ron Padgett's English versions are good companions to the French.
What poets can take from this
- Delete all punctuation from a finished draft and rebuild clarity with line breaks alone.
- Cut connective phrases and let images collide like film shots.
- Anchor one modern poem with an old-fashioned refrain and watch the tension work.
- Try one shaped poem where layout enacts the subject, but keep the words strong enough to survive being retyped as plain lines.
- Mix registers deliberately: sacred and commercial, ancient and brand-new, in the same stanza.
Try it yourself
Write an unpunctuated poem that walks through your town or city from morning to midnight, cutting between at least five scenes with no transitions.
Questions
Why did Apollinaire remove punctuation from Alcools?
He decided the rhythm of the verse and the line breaks themselves did the punctuating, so marks were redundant. He cut them at proof stage in 1913, and the choice influenced generations of free verse.
What is a calligramme?
A poem whose words are arranged on the page to form a picture related to its subject, such as rain, a heart or a fountain. Apollinaire named and popularised the form in his 1918 book Calligrammes.
Did Apollinaire invent the word surrealism?
Yes. He used 'surréalisme' in 1917 in connection with the ballet Parade and his own play, and André Breton later adopted it for the movement he founded in 1924.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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