APOLLINAIRE AN ELEGY

By: Walter Lowenfels
February 5, 2025

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

We can give you nothing
but what we take
      there’s
the cold comfort of objective immortality.
No more the burial with flints.
The witch doctors have gone
      with them
the obscure hopes of earlier Christs.
No more the white bird rises invisibly
to carry the soul from sight.
      For us
the purity of extinction.
Not even Mr. Ford shall lie
with a thousand piston rings
to feed his soul in heaven.

Statistics rule a million millions
the oppression of whose certain numbers
leaves their dying epic as an almanac
and no sadder than the census of East
     St. Louis.
Tragedy is one
  and one is a poet.

— Apollinaire an Elegy was published in 1930. This is an excerpt.

***

RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.