For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

Abstract

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry. Like a number of fellow poets, Apollinaire believed that within one to two centuries the record would replace the book as the preferred method for the dissemination of poetic texts.[1] However, for Apollinaire, the gramophone