Pieced together from fragments Apollinaire had been saving for over fifteen years, The Poet Assassinated tells the story of the great Croniamantal, from his conception by an itinerant musician and his sensuous mother Macarée through his rise as a poet in Paris to his eventual death at the hands of a poet-hating mob.


Apollinaire’s language is symbolic and pictorial; the midwife who drags Croniamantal screaming into the world muses upon the aesthetics of war, declaring: ‘O the beautiful and unbending phalli which these cannons are’ and the lovers’ dialogue between Croniamantal and his paramour Tristouse Ballerinette consists of phrases that would be at home in the Egyptian Book of the Dead: ‘I gnaw your hair which coils like worms on the body of death...’


The broken, episodic nature of the book allows for farcical routines — the description of vulgar Germans in a Munich beer-hall, for example, or Tristouse’s long speech about fashion (‘Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats’) and is perfectly complimented in the Rupert Hart-Davis English edition with photomontages by Jim Dine.

‘Still, the Oberkellner and the waiters did not return. The drinkers pressed in at the counters where they served themselves, but the barrels would give forth no more; no longer did you hear from minute to minute the sonorous bangs which announced the tapping of a new cask. The singing stopped, the angry drinkers yelled insults at the bartenders and against the March beer itself. Others profited from the intermission by vomiting wildly, their eyes bulging out of their heads; their neighbours encouraged them with an imperturbable seriousness. Hannes Irlbeck, who had gotten back on his feet, but not without great effort, sniffed and murmured: «There’s no more beer in Munich.»’ p24-25