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Hugo von Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna on February 1, 1874. He was the only child of Dr. jur. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a wealthy bank director, and his wife Anna. His family was originally Jewish but had converted to Catholicism many years before.

From an early age, Hofmannsthal showed himself to be an exceptionally talented child, both as an avid reader as well as a writer of poetry and plays. He entered the literary scene at age 16 through the publication of his first poems and essays under the pseudonym of Loris. His father introduced him to the circle of writers called Jung Wien at Café Griensteidl where Hofmannsthal became acquainted with Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan George. With the latter Hofmannsthal shared a fifteen-year-long friendship. George was both a father and a friend to Hofmannsthal and published many of Hofmannsthal’s poems in his journal, Blätter für die Kunst until, years later, they parted and went separate ways. 

Hugo von Hofmannsthal (February 1, 1874 – July 15, 1929), was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.

Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna, the son of an upper-class Austrian mother and an Austrian-Italian bank manager. His great-grandfather, to whom his family owed the noble title "von Hofmannsthal," was a Jewish merchant ennobled by the Austrian emperor. He began to write poems and plays from an early age. He met the German poet Stefan George at the age of seventeen and had several poems published in George's journal, Blätter für die Kunst. He studied law and later philology in Vienna but decided to devote himself to writing upon graduating in 1901. Along with Peter Altenberg and Arthur Schnitzler, he was a member of the avant garde group Young Vienna (Junges Wien). Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss, and wrote libretti for several of his operas, including Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1913, rev. 1916), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die Ägyptische Helena (1927), and Arabella (1933).

"But laugh at me
   Men from everywhere especially men from here
   For there are so many things I dare not tell you
   So many things you would never let me say
   Have pity on me ..."

This very late poem was written after Apollinaire had been wounded in the head, and undergone trepanation in Paris. In a measured retrospective of his life, he refers now to "the frightful conflict", as if its horror has at last sunk in, but it is still experienced rather as part of the shock of the new, part of what he calls, famously, "cette longue querelle de la tradition et de l'invention / De l'Ordre et de l'Aventure".

The overriding requirement is still to find new poetic forms, more audacious and revolutionary metaphors, adventurous ideograms and experimental typography. In "La victoire" he even imagines a new, improved language, made of nothing but consonants, of raucous throat noise and "labial farts", that would issue forth accompanied by gobs of spit (not "postilions" - a rare error of this translation).

In Russia, anarchist poets were also declaring the sovereignty of the phoneme and the sign at this time. This is why Apollinaire is the modernist that the consecrated English war poets never were; his work is far more assimilable to that of TS Eliot, who published "Prufrock" in 1917, just a year before Calligrammes. This lavishly produced, bilingual edition of Calligrammes, first published in 1980 and now re-issued, remains the comprehensive edition, though I would refer the reader also to the finely judged recent translations of this poet by Robert Chandler in the much slimmer Dent Everyman series.

Apollinaire survives, not only for the intrinsic freshness of his writing, but because he spares us the religiose excesses of Catholic writers such as Maurice Barrès or Paul Claudel, whose thought and imagery, so tempting and consoling at the outset, was finally loathsome to postwar sensibility, to the spirit of Dada and surrealism in particular.

Not all the poems in Calligrammes are successful; Apollinaire wrote a lot, and at speed, so there are duds and wet squibs among them. With the image of Lou or Madeleine or some other muse before him, he sometimes falls into torrid cliché.

But for the English ear, attuned to our elegiac notes that seem to run indelibly deep - Elgar, Binyon's For the Fallen, the landscapes, and death, of Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney's rivers, the Severn and the Somme - Apollinaire also has his moments, as in the matchless ideogram "La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau" and the initiatory poem "La petite auto", in which the poet memorialises his night journey by car from Normandy to Paris, just as the order for mobilisation and the first call-up was being issued: "O dark departure where our 3 headlights died"; "O tender night before the war ..." So the poet recalls, in his own way, before driving into "une époque Nouvelle", that blessed and apparently immutable summer of 1914.

Apparently revelling in its own egotistical sublime, it is not surprising that Calligrammes, the major collection of Apollinaire's war poems, published in 1918 and reissued here in an English translation by Anne Hyde Greet, should have raised the hackles of critics. At his most hard-nosed, in the 1930s, Louis Aragon criticised it sharply for its aestheticism and frivolity, declaring that no poem should countenance any description of war that made it look attractive. Which only goes to show how dogmatism can blunt judgment and proscribe taste. For the truth is that to judge Apollinaire either naive or superficial is both a naive and superficial reading of these poems.

Certainly, Calligrammes, or the fiercely erotic litanies of the posthumous Poèmes à Lou, with their risky linking of combatant aggression and sexual desire, would not yield much to a "poets against the war" pamphlet. Apollinaire, it would seem, was one of those men who marched away, sans se poser trop de questions, in response to the nation's call. There is no direct political protest as such: and in fact when it is your own soil that is attacked, protest is perhaps that much harder.

There was also, in France, the so-called union sacrée in which political parties of every stripe buried their differences in the national cause in the early days of the war. It is worth remembering also that Apollinaire, Polish-Italian by birth, only received his French nationality in 1916, after fighting at the front for more than a year. This would have added to his (unquestionably genuine) patriotic ardour, since he had always desired to be recognised officially as French.

What we have in these poems, instead of politics, is a subjective and affective chronicle in which the wilder imaginative flights are constantly pinned down by immediate detail. A consistent governing sensibility expands then retracts with impressive suppleness - it's rather like a genie returning to its bottle. In some poems, the individual destiny is frequently writ large in unashamedly mythic style, and then disarmingly deflated in a way unique to this poet. In "Merveille de la guerre" we find: "I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire / Who was lucky in the war and knew how to be everywhere / In the lucky towns behind the front lines / In all the rest of the universe ..." That heroic ubiquity is later thrown into doubt, especially in the plangent and unsettled last lines of the final poem of the book, "La jolie rousse":

Rousseau made two versions of this double portrait of Apollinaire
with his mistress Marie Laurencin. He grandly titled it The Muse Inspiring
the Poet (1909).

Henri Rousseau The Muse Inspiring the Poet second version 1909 Basel, Õffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum Basel Photo: akg-images/Erich Lessing enlarge

Photo of Marie Laurencin, 1924 by French Photographer, (20th century) Bibliothèque Litteraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, France. Archives Charmet Photo: Bridgeman Art Library enlarge

Portrait photo of Guillaume Apollinaire, c.1910 Photo: akg-images enlarge

Rousseau died in poverty and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Two years later the artists Pablo Picasso and Robert Delaunay, along with Rousseau’s landlord, paid for a new grave. Apollinaire wrote a short poem for the headstone.

Translation of the inscription: We greet you Gentle Rousseau, you hear us Delaunay his wife Monsieur Quával and I Let our baggage pass free through heaven’s gate We’ll bring you brushes, paints and canvases So that you can devote your sacred leisures In the Real light to painting, as you did my portrait, Painting the Face of the stars. Guillaume Apollinaire 1912

Under the Pont Mirabeau the Seine

           Flows with
our loves

   Must I recall again?

Joy always used to follow after pain

           Let the
night come: strike the hour

           The days go
past while I stand here

Hands holding hands let us stay face to face

           While under
this bridge

     Bridge our arms make slow race

Long looks in a tired wave at a wave's pace

           Let the
night come: strike the hour

           The days go
past while I stand here

Love runs away like running water flows

           Love flows
away

But oh how slow life goes

How violent hope is nobody knows

           Let the
night come: strike the hour

           The days go
past while I stand here

The days pass and the weeks pass but in vain

           Neither time
past

     Nor love comes back again

Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine

           Let the
night come: strike the hour

           The days go
past while I stand here