Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry fills the twenty-year interregnum between the end of Symbolism as an organized movement and the birth of Surrealism. The earliest selections in Alcools were composed the year of Mallarmé's death in 1898, and Calligrammes appeared only a few months before Breton and Soupault began their collaboration on Les Champs magnétiques in 1919. The work of perhaps no other poet in France at the turn of the century flows in such a direct current between the two dominant schools of the last seventy-five years. Obviously our appreciation of this period would gain considerably could we but view the poems of Apollinaire in the order in which he created them, proceeding with him from the mellifluous, fin de siècle delicacy of his first published piece, Clair de lune, to the discordant lines of Victoire:
On veut de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons
On veut des consonnes sans voyelles
Des consonnes qui pètent sourdement Imitez le son de la toupie
Laissez pétiller un son nasal et continu
Faites claquer votre langue
Servez-vous du bruit sourd de celui qui mange sans civilité
Le raclement aspiré du crachement ferait aussi une belle consonne