Wendy Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she examines Apollinaire's focus on the creative process.

Anna Balakian, in her article on Guillaume Apollinaire in Yale French Studies, notes that in the early decades of the twentieth century, a rift that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century between art and science was growing wider. Artists concluded that “science seemed to be the destroyer of the marvelous and the mysterious.” In addition, after scientific inquiry produced inventions such as the electric light, the cinema, and the subway, “the supremacy of the scientist in the history of human progress” appeared assured.

Unlike others, who felt challenged by the supremacy of the scientist, Apollinaire was fascinated by the new world scientists were creating. As a result, Balakian states, Apollinaire “sought conciliation between the work of the scientist and of the...