SOURCE: "Cendrars's Modernism," in The Southern Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, April, 1970, pp. 561-65.

Below, Houston reviews several of Cendrars's poems from the volume Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars.

After a recent spate of good biographies and translations of Apollinaire, the English-speaking reader is now presented (in a bilingual text for the poems) with selected works of Blaise Cendrars, Apollinaire's contemporary in remaking French poetry. Cendrars was a minor poet, and not a very productive one at that, but he occupies a significant place in the development of a modernist poetic style on the eve of World War I.

The modernism of Cendrars involves both subject and form. His poems reject the old humanism in favor of celebrating an age of large-scale industry, of speed and consumption. "Advertising=Poetry" is the title of one of his occasional essays, and he felt life to be enhanced by the new sense...