'In the end you're tired of this antiquated world' Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) is the most significant French poet of early modernism, and the most colourful. His exuberant, adventurous poetry matched the eventful times through which he lived, and his experimentalism heralded a new artistic order. In the Paris of the belle epoque, Apollinaire's prolific writing - poems, short stories, erotic novels, art criticism - as well as his magnetic personality brought him fame and even some notoriety. His two great collections of poetry, Alcools and Calligrammes, made his reputation, and they include love poems as well as the war poetry for which he is best known. Apollinaire coined the word 'surrealism', and he led the literary and artistic avant-garde right up to his death two days before the Armistice, weakened by injuries received earlier in the War. This new selection by Martin Sorrell covers the full range of Apollinaire's career, and includes some of the poet's inventive pictorial calligrams. The introduction and notes explore his seminal role in the culture of the twentieth century. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his 'calligrammes'. Subtle and complex, yet often direct, his poetry is still fresh and memorable.

A collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, provincial romantics, and adventurers in crime, The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire's first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. "The best surrealist works strive to achieve the music of these stories. Fluid, brief, they read like distilled fairy tales". -- VLS

When Guillaume Apollinaire was sent to the trenches during World War I, he had already published his groundbreaking book of poems, Alcools, inspiring artists of the budding Surrealist movement and making a foundational mark on twentieth-century literature. The letters he sent to his fiancee Madeleine Pages while fighting on the front in Champagne offer an unprecedented look into the life and mind of this literary great. Ranging from memories of his childhood in Rome with his mother (a Polish noblewoman) to his reflections on literary giants like Racine and Tolstoy, the letters also chronicle his daily life as a soldier in the brutal Great War. Letters to Madeleine is a moving portrait of a poet facing one of humanity's starkest realities, and it will be of interest not only to fans of Apollinaire but to those interested in personal accounts of the First World War as well.

When Guillaume Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, as the result of a war wound, he was already known as one of the most original and important poets of his time. He had led the migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse; he had helped formulate the principles of Cubism, having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word "Surrealist"; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avant-garde. This bilingual, illustrated edition of The Selected Writings of Apollinaire, the only representative collection in English translation, begins with a comprehensive critical Introduction by the translator, Roger Shattuck. The next section is devoted to poetry. Included here are almost half of Apollinaire's two best-known volumes, Alcools and Calligrammes, as well as a selection from five other books, and the long love poem La Chanson du Mal-Aime in its entirety. The prose section leads off with "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poetes", a seminal discussion of modern poetry that anticipates such movements as Dada and Futurism. This is followed by Apollinaire's almost unobtainable "Introduction to Baudelaire and Oneirocriticism", an early experimental work composed in a style prophetic of Surrealist automatic writing. There are, in addition, two stories, a passage from Anecdotiques, and a section from the novel Le Poete Assassine.

A fully annotated, bilingual edition, "Calligrammes" is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire - Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice - died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.