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PARTISAN REVIEW
larity of Apollinaire (whose work is now the subject of a course at the
Sorbonne) is based on a far more traditional appeal. This appeal has
been excellently described by Marcel Raymond in his fundamental book,
From Baudelaire to Surrealism.
Apollinaire's poems, M. Raymond writes,
display a "tender and melancholy sentimentality which sometimes
resembles Nerval, sometimes Verlaine, sometimes Heine, and they are
nourished at the springs of popular lyricism. Lays and complaints, bal–
lads and romances haunt his memory." It is not Apollinaire the
enfant
terrible,
then, who has found his place in the corpus of French poetry.
Rather, it is the poet whose
"Le
pont de Mirabeau" has practically be–
come a folksong, and who could truthfully write of himself, in his most
famous poem:
M oi qui sais des lais pour les reines
Les complaintes de mes annees
Des hymnes d'esclaves aux murenes
La romance du mal-aime
Et des chansons pour les sirenes.*
Stefan George is a very different kind of poet from Apollinaire and
a very different kind of man. Instead of the carefree Bohemianism of
Apollinaire, we find in George an obsessive and what can only be called
a peculiarly German need for discipline, order and conformity. This
need revealed itself in every aspect of his life and work. It is typical,
for instance, that George instinctively rejected the Symbolist experiments
in free verse, even though he was otherwise deeply indebted to Symbolist
poetry. "The strictest measure is at the same time the greatest freedom,"
he wrote of poetry. In this imperious sophism, we catch a good deal of
George's quality as a poet and as a man. And this quality may well
explain why George, who had a more widespread impact on German
culture than either Rilke or Hofmannsthal, is nonetheless not as well–
known outside Germany as his great contemporaries.
Mr. Bennett's little book on George, although written in a pedes–
trian fashion, is a serious, well-informed and very useful introduction to
George's work. When George began to write, German poetry was dom–
inated by a tradition of facile folksong lyricism. George, largely under
French influence, reacted against this tradition very much as Apollinaire
reacted against the studied formalism of French poetry under the in–
fluence of Heine and Nerval (the latter, it should be remembered, was
• "I who know stanzas for the queens/Ballads for my growing-old/The hymns
of slaves to the lampreys/The romance of one ill-loved/And some songs for the
sirens."
