Women and Pleasure in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligram Collection Poèmes à Lou

This article attempted to examine the connections between poetry and the constructions of women and pleasure emphasized by the author. The works examined were those of Guillaume Apollinaire, a famous French poet whose calligramatic poetry collections specifically positioned women as objects of pleasure. Most interestingly, in Apollinaire's poetry, the depiction of women as objects of pleasure through connotative symbols that could only be given significance by decoding the highly cultural meanings contained in the connotative symbols. The theory of the male gaze was used here to examine how visual pleasure had been operated by the poet. Meanwhile, semiotics had been used to decode the calligrammatic aspects of Apollinaire's poems. This research found that symbols of exoticism, reproduction, and fantastic pleasures were utilized by Apollinaire in his poetry to emphasize his dominance of women by positioning them as objects of pleasure.