Lot n° 183
Estimation :
3500 - 4000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 4 480EUR
Guillaume APOLLINAIRE. L.A.S., Paris July 8, 1918, [to Misia - Lot 183
Guillaume APOLLINAIRE. L.A.S., Paris July 8, 1918, [to Misia Sert]; 4 pages small in-8, heading Ministère des Colonies, Cabinet of the Minister (small slit repaired to one fold).
Superb letter, a few months before his death, in which he defends and explains his collection Calligrammes, which Misia Sert had judged without reading it carefully.
"The letter I wanted to write to you was only intended to thank you for your frankness and also to protest very gently against this judgment on a book that had hardly been read. Having only a mediocre taste for poetry in general, were you not led to hate it immediately because it is poetry and deals with war. Goethe, too (whose poems you taste translated into prose) wrote a war book, a bourgeois epic if ever there was one: Hermann and Dorothea! I don't know if you find this idyll more buffoonish than my Calligrams? With all due respect to the great European from Weimar, I find it annoying. I will certainly not have the front to make my own apology, but grant me that there is no aestheticism in my books, certainly varied in form and content, especially in poetic matter. The war that is sung in Calligrammes comes out of myself, it is closely connected with my life. Isn't it the excuse and the reason of this book that I went to war? And then I put so little war in it. And is there really anything else in this book than life, hope, suffering transfigured as much as it inspired me? All this would no doubt appear better to the very beautiful reader who would take the trouble to read the collection and let the poems in it sing. The lyrical texts want and are worth being solicited "... He no longer remembers if Goethe hated war: "I consider it can be a good thing for France and that is enough for me not to hate it, since on the other hand I have never been bored at the front"... Then he reports an amusing conversation with Baron F. about Hermann and Dorothée, in which the latter compares the apothecary to M. "Homaïs": "And
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