The Literary Tower

Writers quickly recognized the tower's metaphorical power. Guillaume Apollinaire's 1913 calligramme "Tour" arranged words in the tower's shape, making it literally a poem. He called it "Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning," transforming industrial architecture into pastoral poetry.

Blaise Cendrars wrote: "Tower, you are the world's first great accessible poem. Baudelaire dreamed of readers entering his verses; Eiffel built verses we can climb."

The Surrealists adopted the tower as a symbol of the modern unconscious. In Jean Cocteau's 1921 play "The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower," the structure becomes a site of transformation where bourgeois conventions dissolve into dream logic. The tower represented the marriage of rational engineering and irrational desire.

Roland Barthes's 1964 essay "The Eiffel Tower" provided the definitive cultural analysis. He wrote: "The Tower is nothing, yet it is everything. It has no interior, no purpose, no utility. It exists purely to be seen and to see from. This uselessness is its genius—it is pure symbol, available for any meaning we wish to project."