In 1909, he published his first book, a substantial work of prose entitled L’Enchanteur pourrissant, which was illustrated by woodcuts by André Derain; a version of this text, written in Stavelot, had already appeared in a magazine that Apollinaire had started a few years earlier, Le Festin d’Esope, but this work has disappeared. The next year, he published ten stories under the title L’Hérésiarque et Cie, and at the same time he published a book of short poems, Le Bestiaire, which had engravings by Raoul Dufy accompanying the poems.

Guillaume Apollinaire was 33 years old when he published (in 1913) his first collection of poetry, Alcools. This book represented 15 years of poetic work, but lacked any chronological organization. In the presentation of this collection Gerald Purnelle provides a chronology, and also reproduces certain statements from the poet about the genesis of the work. Purnelle also writes about the critical reception of Apollinaire’s work, recalling for example that Georges Duhamel compared it to a “curio shop”. “Apollinaire did not try to make his book a coherent whole in terms of a theme or an aesthetic or in his way of constructing poems,” says Purnelle with a smile. “He didn’t exactly produce a flea market, but the great diversity of the work can in fact pose a problem. I try to show that even in the midst of such variety, among elegiac, symbolist and visionary poems, there is unity at a much deeper level. Apart from “Zone”, the initial poem, and “Vendémiaire”, which is the last poem in the collection, the principle of construction of the grouping of poems remains a perpetual question. Calligrammes, which is chronologically arranged, is much easier to understand.”

In his introduction, Purnelle raises the question of Apollinaire’s modernity, in a nuanced fashion. “He was not a member of the avant-garde, who wanted to forget the past. He based his poetry on knowledge of the tradition and its partial continuance, but he practised innovation and invention. He was not a traditionalist, though. He wanted poetry to develop and renew itself. He was a man who had a vision of a future in which poetry would matter. His poems invent this future. In this, he is modern, without ever cutting himself off from past or future. But it isn’t always easy to know what he intended in defining his creation. I have tried to present his ideas, his lines of force and his constant preoccupations. On another hand, he is not an advocate of modernity outside poetry. Trains, planes, machines, although playing a role in some poems, are not the subject. When he speaks of modernity, it’s always with humour, distance and irony”.

The subject of his poetry, that which is the basis of the unity of his poetry, is the future, but it is also himself and poetry itself. Not the modernity of the modern world or even his place in the modern world. “It is him projected into the future. In Alcools, although things are indicated more neatly in Calligrammes, he talks more about the future than the present. He refers to the past through myths or legends, or through his own past”, says Purnelle. Apollinaire can be said to have practiced a “reinvented lyricism”. “His was a lyricism that belonged to modernity. The surrealists invented the poetry of the 20^th century to a great extent in opposition to Apollinaire and they denied through their work on the unconscious and automatic writing, etc. the things that he wanted to create”.

Apollinaire loved modern painting and was an art critic. He wanted to unite poetry and painting by bringing together “lyrical and colourful ideograms” in a book that was supposed to have been titled Et moi aussi je suis peintre and had been scheduled to appear in August 1914. The war had other ideas. From this project, a few poem/drawings remain, the ones that were scattered throughout Calligrammes, which was published in April, 1919. Apollinaire would only live seven more months. “When in 1913 he invented his “coloured ideograms” – or “calligrammes” (a portmanteau word made from “calligraphie” and ideogram, which he did not use until 1917), in fact wanted to publish a book in which he would be poet and painter at the same time”, Gérald Purnelle confirmed. “These first calligrammes were supposed to be painted in watercolours or in gouache. He is acting as a visionary. Seeing new techniques be invented – film, photography, posters – he is thinking about a new form of poetry that goes beyond the printed page and becomes a total work”.