Never before translated into English and published in full in French only in 2005, here are Apollinaire's "war and love" letters and poems, as sent to Madeleine Pagès, his fiancée, from
the trenches of Champagne by this Parisian homme de lettres transformed overnight into an artilleryman. They are comparable, according to his biographer, "to the correspondence of
Delacroix and Van Gogh, and the literary equal of any volume of love letters ever published. Nowhere, is there a more 'living picture' of a poet in a war or, outside of Stendhal, a more
vivid picture of war itself. Journalism, that usual vehicle for the sights and sounds of war, shrivels beside these letters and poems of Apollinaire (Francis Steegmuller,
Apollinaire:
Poet among the Painters)."
For the poems and calligrammes that make up approximately 15 percent of the text, the French is provided along with plain translations and many illustrations as needed to display
Apollinaire's characteristic "ideographic" experimentation.
Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki, known by the pseudonym Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), was among the foremost poets of the early twentieth century. One of the most popular
members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris, his status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works
were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Apollinaire's work—bizarre, symbolist and fantastic—is expressed chiefly in L'Enchanteur pourissant (The Decaying Enchanter, 1909), Le Bestiaire
(The Bestiary, 1911), Les Alcools (The Spirits, 1913) and Calligrammes (1918). He is credited with coining the term "surrealism" and writing one of the
earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1917). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died at 38
of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
