In his comments, Purnelle explores the figure of the calligramme, and reproduces the conference that Apollinaire gave in 1917, entitled “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes”. He also makes remarks about the poets of the Great War. That bloody conflict in fact gives a certain thematic coherence to a collection that otherwise lacked formal unity, divided between well rhymed octosyllables and the most daring calligrammes, which some people found unreadable. “It is important to remember that every poem, or almost every one, has its own poetics, and reinvents poetry for itself. There are different ways of presenting the place of a subject in a poem, of speaking to the reader, of defining the function of the poem and its objective. Often, in his poems, you have a speaker who is Apollinaire himself, but at the same time an idealized and mythified figure of the poet. In the war poems, for example, when he says “I” he is not so much reporting what has happened to him or what he has seen. His purpose has more to do with the future, the construction of beauty, and a reflexivity of the poet upon himself. It is at one and the same time Apollinaire the soldier and Apollinaire who thinks himself as a poet”.

He has been regularly reproached with having wished to exhibit the “beauties” of war, and with not having insisted on its atrocities. But in the view of Purnelle, this accusation rings hollow. “He refused to be situated either in the camp of the patriots or the camp of the pacifists. He was somewhere else. He chose to enlist, he fought in the war. But he had the good taste not to sing about it the way others did – the heroism of the soldiers, the justification of the war, the hatred of the enemy… He based his poetry only on his experience. He did not reproduce reality, but rather invented a new one. The visual beauties he describes are pointed at a moral beauty. He wished for victory because he believed that victory would be followed by a new era”.

What can we say about the poetic form that is created in these two collections? “In Alcools, Apollinaire uses free verse in his prophetic poems and regular verse in his elegiac poems. In Calligrammes, when he wants to express order, discipline or beauty, he most often uses regular verse forms. When he addresses himself to the world and prophesies about the future, he uses free verse, even if there is some interdependence between these forms.”
 
In view of his poetic diversity, many poets can claim descent from Guillaume Apollinaire. Gérald Purnelle observes that despite things that happened long ago, some surrealists’ work is very compatible with that of Apollinaire, e.g., surrealists like Aragon or Desnos. Elegiac music and poetry, harmonious verse, simple, intimate and at the same time open to the other and to the world – this may have influenced the poets of the Rochefort school during 1940s and 1950s, as perhaps seen in the work of René-Guy Cadou. “I define his unity with reference to the figure of the poet and the insertion of the subject into his poems. That 20th century poetry that is most lyrical comes from him”, concluded Purnelle.