From “La Maison des morts” to “La Synagogue”: For a reassessment of Apollinaire’s multicultural verse

What if our approach to Apollinaire’s free verse turned away from the prose découpage of “La Maison des morts” in favor of rereading the oldest free-verse poem in Alcools: “La Synagogue”? That is, a poem in which the irruption of the new rhythm coincides with the insults of German Jews, and which ends with a line phonetically transcribing a verse from Hebrew. This would be an opportunity to define a multicultural use of free verse informed by Apollinaire’s multiple identity.