Beginning in the wintry streets of South London, where Apollinaire twice visited Playden, in November 1903 and May 1904, the story ends in Paris, where hot June sunshine gives way to vibrantly electric evenings, and the lines of verse overflow into one another, preparing the redemptive finale. Mythology, history, and biblical references endow the poet’s individual experience with universal resonance, while three separate interludes in the poem highlight his contrasting moods and reactions. “Aubade,” the first of that trinity, captures a time of ingenuous early courtship, filled with the promise of love and fulfilment, in an unspoiled, sylvan setting. That mood is soon countered, however, by its symmetrical opposite, “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,” where three obscenely vituperative stanzas allegorically express the poet’s seething anger and frustrated desire. His disarray persists in the subsequent “Seven Swords” section, where occult imagery works as the coded description of a real or imagined night of passion, leading to what purports to be a definitive sense of closure.

This apparently disparate poem is unified by the unbroken flow of regular, rhyming, five-line stanzas, octosyllabic in the French, and meticulous artistry is further exemplified by the placing of a bridge in the middle line of the central stanza, “the Bridge of the Return” (“le pont des Reviens-t’en”), spanning the heart of the poem, a forlorn hope of eventual reconciliation. Overall structure is further reinforced by the rhythmical recurrence of two refrains. One compares the Milky Way to terrestrial streams of milk and honey and to the pale skin of naked lovers, asking whether celestial forces steer our helpless destiny. The other refrain reflexively inscribes this heart-searching poem, “The romance of the badly loved,” into a lineage of lyrical creativity that includes the most plaintive songs of mythology, antiquity, and the courts of medieval royalty. Closing the poem, this second refrain is ultimately invested with a powerfully affirmative tone: the poet proclaims himself heir to an ageless Orphic tradition, which transposes suffering into sweet, soulful music. The power of song overcomes the vicissitudes of human existence, and hope, like the Phoenix, is reborn from its own ashes. “No, you shouldn’t see sadness in my work,” wrote Apollinaire, “but life itself, with the constant and conscious voluptuous pleasure of living, discovering, seeing, knowing, and finding expression.”

Years later, looking back on this episode, Apollinaire admitted that while he once believed he was badly loved, it was he who loved badly. Playden emigrated to California, where she learned, late in life, widowed and living with her sister, that she had inspired one of the century’s great love poems written by the jealous suitor she knew as “Kostro.”

In “The Brazier,” written in 1908, Apollinaire immolates his past, then contemplates the foregone script of mortal destiny, inscribed in the constellations, “bright new beasts” above us. “The Brazier” also provides, however, an astronaut’s view of planet Earth, with rivers like stitching, mending tears in the fabric, and finally counters fatalism by reasserting, whatever the cost, the writer’s commitment to a nonnegotiable poetic quest. All experience feeds the Pentecostal flames: Apollinaire’s prison poems, “In La Santé,” date from the week in 1911 when he was wrongfully held in custody after the theft of the Mona Lisa. Expressing abject, personal anguish, they also recall poems by Villon and Verlaine, allowing Apollinaire to place himself on an equal footing with those prestigious, similarly incarcerated predecessors. Elsewhere, in “Hotel,” for example, Apollinaire takes simple words to transmute ordinary pleasures, a day off, or a five-minute smoke in the sunshine into a charismatic poetic gem.

If only one Apollinaire poem could be saved for posterity, it should, however, be “Zone.” An archetypally modernist text, opening Alcools and this collection, “Zone” declares that modern grace is epitomized by a new, industrial street, while the contemporary muse is to be found among secretaries on their way to work. That line incidentally demonstrates the poetic potential of a new addition to the French language, the term sténo-dactylographes (literally “shorthand typists”), exemplifying Apollinaire’s determination to write up-to-the-minute verse that mobilizes all linguistic registers, literary, colloquial, technical, archaic, and contemporary. Optically alert, he also revels in the attention-grabbing vitality of posters plastered on city walls, advertisements, cheap novels with lurid covers, illustrated magazines, and newspaper headlines from around the world. Embracing these new combinations of word and image, engendered by the latest communication and print technologies, “Zone” is a manifesto for new forms of art and literature, ready to channel the pulsing energy of city life and popular culture.

Apollinaire is the finest twentieth-century poet of the Seine and Paris, made pastoral in “Zone,” where the Eiffel Tower is a shepherdess and the honking rush-hour bridges are a flock of bleating sheep. “Zone” is a peripatetic poem that takes a twenty-four-hour walk across Paris and back, starting in the morning, ending the following dawn, prefiguring Joyce’s Ulysses, which transposes Homer’s Odyssey to a day in modern Dublin. Within that frame, Apollinaire dissolves all limits of space and time, as his poem moves through continents and cultures, across one man’s life and human history, with seamless transitions and sudden juxtapositions, unfolding by association of words, sounds, and images, in a controlled stream of consciousness, facilitated by the poet’s original and highly influential abolition of punctuation.

Apollinaire often aspires to that free-flowing, multidimensional simultaneity, conferring on the poet and reader an aspect of ubiquitous divinity. Moving from personal experience to an arcane literary reference was also for Apollinaire a natural process. His poetry exteriorizes an inner universe where observations, memories, and aspirations mingle easily with characters and scenarios gleaned from constant reading and the perusal of offbeat sources, usually retained because they correspond in some way to his own experience or preoccupations. Life and legends coalesce and frontiers between the known and the possible disappear to create a highly infectious poetic view of reality, enhanced by imagination.

Apollinaire was a modernist for whom Homer, Dante, and Hermes Trismegistus were close contemporaries, so it is typical, but still surprising, that the apparently iconoclastic opening line of “Zone” is, in the original French, couched in twelve syllables, the form of an alexandrine. Throughout his poetry, Apollinaire deploys classical versification as much as far-out formal experimentation, commanding the forces of both order and adventure. So “Zone” was completed shortly after “The Pont Mirabeau,” and these are both poems of lost love, lamenting in different ways the end of Apollinaire’s five-year relationship with the painter Marie Laurencin. While “Zone” is expansively experimental, “The Pont Mirabeau” is concisely accessible, hypnotically composed in the traditional form of a thirteenth-century spinning song. Apollinaire shared with the futurists that high-speed, transcontinental consciousness that Marinetti called “the wireless imagination,” but unlike his Italian colleagues, Apollinaire was no iconoclast. He combined visionary outreach with respect for past achievements, as when he prophetically called for a new museum to be built in Paris to conserve and display great works of art from Africa, the South Seas, and worldwide tribal cultures. Resolutely anti-sectarian, Apollinaire promoted and encouraged new artistic initiatives but resisted the curbs and constraints imposed by schools, movements, and all forms of aesthetic dogma.