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The Poetics Of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire On Pablo Picasso, Pamela A. Genova

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most original poets of the early twentieth-century French avant garde, played a crucial role in the enunciation of modernist aesthetics. Through innovative poetic forms, Apollinaire set forth a new aesthetics which underscored the inherent ambiguity of an increasingly turbulent modern context. Apollinaire's interest in the pure dynamism of the contemporary material landscape, and his attraction to the image that explodes with immediate presence, also led him to a natural curiosity in the visual arts. Identifying with the Cubist mosaic style of inclusion, the juxtaposition of reality and imagination, and the simultaneity of spatial and …