Apollinairian wanderings: myths and fatalities of the modern

Abstract

This text goes through some places in the literary work of Apollinaire that are motivated by the urban wanderings of the author. A modernization of the gaze is evident there: invested with an allegorical and mythical bias, in favor of an unusual feeling of estrangement from the banal and the quotidian, it concours to a lyrical, sometimes elegiac, game that the writer establishes between objects and figures, and between the past, the present and the future. The wandering Apollinaire, thus, expresses polysemic depth for lived space and time, over an increasing depersonalization imposed by the modern metropolis. The adhesion of Apollinaire to the forms of urban life reveals, at last, orphic power of lyrical and mythical transfiguration of the present.