Guillaume APOLLINAIRE: Autograph manuscript, Avertissement d - Lot 16

Guillaume APOLLINAIRE: Autograph manuscript, Avertissement de l'auteur, [1917 or early 1918]; 1 page in-4 (27 x 21 cm) with erasures and corrections. Draft preface for Calligammes, unpublished. "Here are most of my war poems up to the time I was seriously wounded. I addressed them to my friends in letters from which they kindly drew them. I still miss many of them. I set aside my pre-war poetic output for later publication. The lyrical ideograms that open the collection were written shortly before the outbreak of the great conflict and were to appear under the title Et moi aussi je suis peintre, when mobilization was decided. The publisher disappeared in the turmoil. These are the real victims of the war, and they deserve a place in this book, which includes ideogrammatic and non-ideogrammatic poems written in Nice before my enlistment and then at the depot, almost everything that the war itself inspired in me, while I was in the army, first in the artillery, then in the infantry. Some of my poems as an artilleryman appeared in 1915 in a little book polygraphed in 25 copies at my battery office. It's called Case d'armons, and I think it's the only collection published on the firing line, where newspapers were the main publication."