Paul Claudel and Guillaume Apollinaire as Visual Poets

Abstract

Paul Claudel and Guillaume Apollinaire both experimented with visual forms in an effort to incorporate a more synthetic and immediate experience into their poetry. The letters of the Idéogramme and the shapes of the Calligramme do not reproduce reality as much as they translate the fundamental images and world-view of the authors into the visual mode. In both cases the linearity of writing symbolizes movement and time while the larger unit, word or sentence-shape, imposes a more immobile, spatial form upon this movement. For both authors, in spite of differences, this synthetic aspect of visual logic expresses the structure of the real world, which is a dynamic and simultaneous interaction of multiple phenomena, yet is constant evolution.