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Alcools (English: Alcohols) is a collection of poems by the French author Guillaume Apollinaire. His first major collection, it was published in 1913.
The first poem in the collection, Zone (an epic poem of Paris), has been called " the great poem of early Modernism" by the scholar Martin Sorrell.
The collection had a slow gestation: it assembles unpublished texts and selected poems composed between 1898 and 1912. It includes fragments from a proposed collection titled Le Vent du Rhine, which Apollinaire abandoned to devote himself to a larger work, within which he would reserve a section titled Rhénanes for nine poems inspired by a stay in Germany from 1901 to 1902. After extensive revisions to many of the pieces, the collection was ready in the summer of 1912. However, by the time the first proofs were being corrected in the autumn, Apollinaire decided to change the title from Eau de Vie in favor of Alcools. He also inserted two new poems: Zone and Chantre. The final print date was April 20, 1913.
Apollinaire was not content with gathering his earlier and more recent works. He worked carefully on both the texts (not hesitating to transplant sections from one to another) and the overall arrangement of the collection, whose heterogeneous appearance conceals a true editorial reflection.
"...it's a kind of marquetry. So to say, Apollinaire will make a poem, he will take some verses, he will move the verses to put them elsewhere in another poem, so the verses will be totally transplanted, disoriented if I may say so. He will take bits like that which come from either verse or prose and he puts things in his own way. For example, in Alcools, La Maison des morts was first written as a prose tale which he then cut into verse form."—Laurence Campa, How "Alcools" shook poetry up. France Culture, June 20 2022.
With its alternation of elegiac and humorous pieces, as well as ones that differ in length (for example, Cantor consists of a single verse), Alcools at first glance presents a deliberately heterogeneous aspect. This reflects both the evolution of the author over time, as well as his eclectic culture and tastes for the provocative, picturesque, and scandalous. However, the carefully deliberated structure of the collection gives the whole a structure that partly compensates for its diverse appearance.
In terms of poetic technique, Apollinaire uses both classical verses and forms as well as free verse without regular meter, rhythm, or stanza. He often uses and creates, within the same poem, a patchwork effect.
The total absence of punctuation throughout the collection, adopted at the last minute by Apollinaire during the correction of the proofs, has generated much fascination, particularly to trace the anteriority of this innovation.Pierre Caizergues (2025). 9782367812991, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. ISBN 9782367812991 Beyond this controversy, Apollinaire justifies this radical and much-noted decision: "As far as punctuation is concerned, I only removed it because it seemed useless to me and it in fact is; the very rhythm and the cut of the verses are the true punctuation and there is no need for another".
The style of the volume (intrusion by modernity, free verse, absence of punctuation, discordances) has been compared to the Cubist aesthetic:
"It has roughly the same effect as when, in the same era, we see a Cubist painting for the first time; that is to say a painting where there is no linear perspective but we see a situation, a character, a landscape in all its dimensions at the same time. And suddenly your eye no longer has any reference points. When you remove the punctuation after a while your eye no longer has any reference points either and it is forced to create its own reference points. It really disconcerted people at the time and, after him, we started to write without punctuation and that seemed normal to us, at least for poetry."—Laurence Campa, How "Alcools" shook poetry up. France Culture, June 20 2022.
Like Georges Duhamel, (who, however, spares the sequel À la Santé), critics criticize the collection for its heterogeneous character, certain linguistic negligences as well as easy provocations such as the absence of punctuation. For those, warned against the promoter of Cubism and disconcerted by the aesthetic of surprise, the work resembles a "kaleidoscope" or a "flea market". The most virulent critics evoke the cosmopolitan origins of the author or take inspiration from the title of the collection to speak of drunkenness.
"... a host of heterogeneous objects have ended up in this hovel, some of which are valuable, but none of which are the product of the merchant's industry. This is indeed one of the characteristics of the second-hand market: it resells; it does not manufacture. Moreover, it sometimes resells curious things; one may find, in its filthy displays, a valuable stone mounted on a nail. All this comes from far away, but the stone is pleasant to look at. For the rest, it is an assemblage of fake paintings, exotic and patched clothing, bicycle accessories and private hygiene instruments. A truculent and dazzling variety takes the place of art, in the assembly of objects. It is only through the holes of a shabby chasuble that one can barely see the ironic and candid gaze of the merchant, who is at once a Levantine Jew, a South American, a Polish gentleman and a facchino."Defenders of the collection, on the contrary, praise "its colorful charm, its singular erudition, its new lyricism and the powerful spell of its images".— Georges Duhamel, Le Mercure du France, no. 384, June 15, 1913.
In the long run, the admirers (including Paul Léautaud, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Francis Carco, Jean Royére, the Surrealism, and the Rochefort School) would win their case. The poems of Alcools, which became the manifesto of modern poetry, would be set to music by Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc, and sung by Léo Ferré and Yves Montand. They are now commonly taught in schools and universities.
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