GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE AND IAN HAMILTON FINLAY: EXPLORING THE DIALECTICS OF VERBAL-VISUAL POETIC CONSTRUCTS
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE AND IAN HAMILTON FINLAY: EXPLORING THE DIALECTICS OF VERBAL-VISUAL POETIC CONSTRUCTS

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the visual poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, arguing that the kinship between them is structural rather than incidental. Drawing on close readings of key poems, including Apollinaire’s calligrammes and Finlay’s concrete works from the collection Poems to Hear and See, and situating both poets within the broader contexts of the avant-garde and neo-classicism, it traces their shared re-evaluation of mimesis and their commitment to the poem-as-object. The essay demonstrates that, despite the historical and national distance between them, Apollinaire working within early twentieth-century European modernism and Finlay operating in post-war Scotland, both poets arrive at a comparable conviction: that the word made visible is the word made meaningful, and that the integration of the pictorial and the verbal produces a synesthetic experience irreducible to either mode alone.

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