Alcools comme calligramme musical
Alcools as a Musical Calligram

Summary/Abstract: The structure of Apollinaire’s Alcools, as well as its writing, partakes, in my opinion, of the aesthetics of the cryptogram, the kind of cryptogram that tends to bear the form of a calligram. Furthermore, I contend that the work itself is indeed a crypt calligram. Even if it is true that the poet adhered to the original form of that very ancient poetic genre by accepting the plural as title, at least in this singular form, in the two senses of that adjective, where it is implicitly, and even unconsciously, used as a figure of speech that is aesthetically structuring of Alcools, he goes even further, in a most audacious manner, to extend its traditional graphic meaning to include the musical sense. Alcools is thus a complex musical calligram, using both juxtaposing and overlapping, and therefore designing either sequentially or simultaneously various harmonic forms.

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