uring this period of receding myopia and cubist artists captured the modern world's reaction to the overwhelming global perspective. One such artist, Picasso, distorted his subjects, thus provoking a viewer to react to the ambiguity by freely associating the familiar with the discordant. "Objects and figures are made ever more complex in the effort to unearth the ways in which we build them up in our own perception." In a similar fashion, Apollinaire's, Calligrammes demands cognition through free association.
             Recalling the energy and pre-war enthusiasm that permeated Paris in the early 20th century, Apollinaire's post-WWI works reflects his reaction to the ever-changing landscape of the modern world. Calligrammes, in particular, contains elements of the cubist aesthetic because Apollinaire freely juxtaposes words of war with words of peace. Furthermore, the graphical notation alters the reader's ability to interpret the meaning of poetry. "In conception the calligram derives directly from the techniques of fragmentation and recombination employed in the conversation poems. It stems from the conviction that the simultaneous nature of the consciousness can be even more powerfully rendered by abandoning not only discursive expression but also the traditional linear layout of the poem as well." The imprint of the ideograph abstracts the meaning of a word in the same way that the piercing shapes of a Picasso painting abstract the nature of the subject. As a result, a reader responds to an ideograph the same way he responds to the artwork of Picasso. Instead of comprehending a single line of the poetry, the reader negotiates the ambiguous through a series of responses and reflections.
             When the natural lines of poetry are broken across the page as they are in the ideographs, the act of reading is no longer a linear process. A reader does not internalize the poetry in a rational way, b...