French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Dickow, Le Poète innombrable. Cendrars, Apollinaire, Jacob
Poetry and Poetics

Alexander Dickow, Le Poète innombrable. Cendrars, Apollinaire, Jacob

Editions Hermann, 396 pages, 170 x 240 mm format

ISBN 9782705689957: 35,00 €

Published: September 14, 2015

Publisher's Description:

“The world in a single man—such is the modern poet,” writes Max Jacob. “I am every face,” declares Cendrars. As for Apollinaire, he contemplates all those who compose his universal being: “The peoples crowded together and I myself appeared / Formed by all human bodies and things.” This ambition gives rise to a bewildering multiplicity of styles.

When confronting a poem, asking “who is speaking?” is akin to asking in what capacity they speak, and by what right: a matter of legitimacy. If the poet no longer has a clear social or symbolic role, they may withdraw from their poem—or, alternatively, take advantage of their indeterminate status to play every role. Jacob, Apollinaire, and Cendrars opt for this game of masks, born both of an anxiety—does the poet no longer have any place?—and an aspiration toward the universal: to finally speak for everyone by becoming each in turn.

Alexander Dickow is a scholar, translator, and poet. He lives in Virginia, where he teaches French language and literature at Virginia Tech. He is notably the author of Caramboles (Paris: Argol Éditions, 2008), a collection of poems in French and English.

Published by Éditions Hermann, this study investigates a defining paradox of early twentieth-century French literature. As traditional symbolic roles for writers dissolved, modernists faced a crisis of legitimacy. Rather than retreating into silence, figures associated with the avant-garde embraced an indeterminate status, adopting masks and shifting personae to claim a universal scope. The book examines how this multiplicity of styles reflects both aesthetic ambition and profound existential anxiety regarding the changing function of art in a rapidly modernizing world.

This scholarly analysis will prove valuable to students and researchers of modern poetry, avant-garde aesthetics, and French literary history. By focusing on the strategies of self-representation deployed by Cendrars, Apollinaire, and Jacob, the volume illuminates broader questions concerning authorship and subjectivity in modernist texts. Readers interested in the intersection of poetry and identity during the early decades of the twentieth century will find this work a rigorous and illuminating companion to the period's major lyric output.