“Can(n)ons are useful only in artillery,” he wrote. “In art they are mainly restrictions on style as I understand it.”

As day and night wear on, “Zone” darkens, expressing existential alienation amid inner-city outcasts, a spiritual crisis that is dramatically cut short in a brutal red sunrise at the hour of guillotine executions. In Apollinaire’s poetry, neither defeat nor victory is ever definitive, but expression is a form of catharsis, and the freshness of his writing comes from always starting anew, never on a beaten track.

The two years before the outbreak of the Great War, from 1912 to the summer of 1914, were for the artistic community in Paris a period of grace, characterized by international and intergeneric cross-fertilization. One of the most striking innovations of that period was the appearance of Apollinaire’s picture poems, which he first called lyrical ideograms, then calligrams, and which he had hoped to publish in an anthology entitled Et moi aussi je suis peintre (I Too Am a Painter), his version of Correggio’s exclamation, “Anch’io son pittore!” Words spread out on the page in figurative or abstract designs, combining visibility and readability, space and time, the simultaneous, immediate impact of painting or drawing and the consecutive quality of poetry, gradually unraveled. Like the text, the design may itself be ambiguous, as in the case of “It’s Raining,” where diagonal lines represent summer rain, each letter a droplet, but may also suggest a hand, or the downward trace of five fingers in condensation on a windowpane. In “The Little Car,” however, the shape is plainly figurative, showing the vehicle that speeds through the night, from one era to another, from peace into war. But the earlier “Pont Mirabeau” was already a picture poem, composed, edited, and designed so that its layout and appearance match its subject, flowing down the page like a sinuous river, repeatedly bridged by the two-line refrain.

Apollinaire loved cinema, partly because it fostered the invention of new words and phrases, which he explored in “Before the Movies.” Les Soirées de Paris, his prewar art and literature magazine, included a pioneering film column, assessing the latest releases, and he suggested that cinema could one day develop into the most powerful and poetic of all art forms. Among the visual arts, his main loyalty and passion lay, however, with painting and sculpture, and several of his best prewar poems were inspired by his involvement with contemporary art and artists. Braque and Picasso were taking the subject of a cubist painting, be it a still life or a landscape, as a pretext for the compositional interplay of multifaceted shapes, lines, colors, and textures: how counted more than what. Apollinaire similarly aligned wordplay, sound patterns, and fragmented syntax to test how far linguistic arrangements and permutations could become the primary subject of a poem. In “Tree,” for example, rather than any themes or narrative, the writing itself is the main event. Such formally experimental poems are nevertheless still fixed in personal experience by flashes of perception and memory. Those intimate mini-epiphanies combine with shifting observation, elliptical juxtapositions, puns, and linguistic surprises to produce poems that evoke the imagery and polyfocal layout of paintings by Marc Chagall (in “Across Europe”) and Robert Delaunay (in “The Windows”). Insistent references to light and color also produce kaleidoscopically chromatic effects, following Delaunay to the edge of abstraction, making poetry now as pictorial as it was once primarily musical.

“Monday rue Christine” finds another way to redefine the parameters of poetry, stringing together snippets of conversation overheard in a crowded café, attentive to the rhythms, rhymes, and innovations of city slang and informal dialogue, creating a style that would catch the ear of Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, and New York poets, including Ron Padgett. “Monday rue Christine” incorporates talk of shady deals, overseas contacts, international navigation, card games, narcotics, money problems, painting and journalism, clothes and makeup, all combined with background noise to conjure a closely bohemian hubbub. A discreet observer interjects softly spoken commentary, confiding, for example, that there are “Three lit gas jets,” “The black cat crosses the bar,” “The faucet is running,” “The floor is strewn with sawdust,” reminding us that, as in “The Women,” an earlier conversation poem, the words and phrases here are not randomly recorded but registered and ordered to achieve the desired effects.

“A Phantom Made of Clouds,” in contrast, adopts linear narrative to celebrate Picasso’s pre-cubist depictions of circus performers and to record a poetic encounter on the boulevard Saint-Germain on Bastille Day, a French national holiday. The repeated references to circles and revolutions, the ring of onlookers, the hand turning the barrel organ, fingers rolling a cigarette, the fake dumbells, the coins, and the ritualized movements of the magical little acrobat all evoke “this music of forms,” a new style of lyrical expression born of the visual sensibility and awareness of patterns which also shapes Apollinaire’s picture poems. The audience is spellbound by the acrobat’s performance, and when he disappears, “each spectator was searching inside himself for the miraculous child.” Apollinaire’s poetry, underpinned by his faith in human potential, consistently seeks to stimulate visual and emotional awareness and to communicate the everyday sense of wonder he here associates with childhood.

“The Musician of Saint-Merri” moves to medieval streets on and around the site where the Centre Pompidou now stands, once a dilapidated and seamy quarter that long ago sheltered minstrels and troubadours, not far from the house of Nicolas Flamel, reputedly a great alchemist. A fellow poet, André Salmon, was married in the local church (an event commemorated in another poem selected here), and Apollinaire sometimes returned there with friends, and even led guided tours of the area on behalf of a local history society. In “The Musician of Saint-Merri,” Apollinaire merges that recent experience with the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend, rewritten as an erotic ceremony. His smooth-faced flautist, “a man with no eyes no nose and no ears,” is an ambulatory phallus, which irresistibly attracts a stream of local women who follow, entranced, wherever he leads. The musician’s hypnotic tune is defined as specifically Apollinairian, and the whole poem is a creative antidote to the poet’s painful memories of failed love affairs: It reaffirms the Orphic power of his music, and recounts a compensatory dream of compelling erotic charisma. Beyond personal issues, the poem reenacts the Dionysiac processions of ancient Greece and tribal rituals from other continents, which dramatize the primal forces of Eros and Thanatos. The props and setting also feature clearly gendered Freudian symbols, from the musician’s flute to the empty house with broken windows, making “The Musician of Saint-Merri” a proto-surrealist saga that demonstrates Apollinaire’s precocious awareness of psychoanalytical theories and vocabulary. He gleaned that specialist knowledge from conversations with Gertrude and Leo Stein, but also from his visits to Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, where he was friends with Dr. Jean Vinchon, a young pioneer of art therapy.

In January 1913, Apollinaire accompanied Robert Delaunay to Berlin, where his poem “The Windows” opened the catalogue of a Delaunay exhibition. The poet’s friendly encounters with young expressionist artists and the gallery owner and magazine editor Herwarth Walden made the sudden unfurling of military banners in the summer of 1914 all the more tragic. The Germans advanced on Paris and Apollinaire went south, where he volunteered to enlist in the artillery. After training in Nîmes, he was posted to a wood in Champagne, under fire but behind the frontline trenches. “Here it’s back to nature.