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Epistolary Precarity in the Correspondence of Guillaume Apollinaire and Louise de Coligny-Châtillon

This article explores conditions of precarity in the wartime correspondence of naturalized French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. During his time in the trenches of WWI as an enlisted soldier, Apollinaire was a prolific letter-writer, carrying on correspondence with numerous friends, editors, artists, and writers. He also managed to conduct two passionate love affairs via letter with two very different women, the intrepid aviator Louise de Coligny-Châtillon and the school mistress Madeline Pagès. Focusing on his letters with Coligny-Châtillon, this essay traces how precarity is a central dynamic of their relationship on both sides and also demonstrates how the practice of letter-writing becomes an integral part of Apollinaire’s poetic practice in this period, as traced in the poems of his groundbreaking collection Calligrammes (1918). This essay also examines how Apollinaire scholarship is dominated and colored by a one-way conception of the epistolary genre, especially one in which the female recipient is not usually granted the unique and complex position of letter writer but rather occupies a generic role as “love interest” or “amour de loin.”