Louis ARAGON – Youth autograph poem – “Fugue” 1919.

Louis ARAGON (1897-1982)

Autograph manuscript – Fugue.

One page in-8°. Typographer's grease pencil.

Slnd [1919]

An extraordinary early manuscript, Fugue will take its place in Louis Aragon's first poetic collection, Feu de joie (1920). Fair copy entrusted to its publisher to whom he suggests, in the margin, the calligraphy of a drop cap. Rare and formidable testimony to the original works of one of the masters of French poetry.

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Fugue

One joy bursts into three

measured times of the lyre

Joy breaks out in the woods

that I couldn't say

Turn heads Turn laughter

for whose love

for the love of what 

for the love of me

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Aragon's first poetic collection, Feu de joie, appeared in January 1920 in Au unparelled . Composed of twenty-three poems, the work opens with a cubist frontispiece by Pablo Picasso.

Variously inspired by Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Breton and Dadaism, Aragon developed from his first writings free versification (sometimes described as “literary cubism”) placed at the service of the sound of words. Tinted with the enthusiasm of the post-war period and a certain quest for modernism, these first texts were praised by all.