Apollinaire is generally looked upon as a poet caught between contrasting worlds. By birth he was a hybrid, the son of a Polish adventuress and an Italian army officer, but receiving most of his education in France. In time, he was at a crossroads, rooted in the late nineteenth century, but thrown into the frenetic innovations of the early years of the twentieth century (the surge of scientific discoveries, the widespread use of electricity and the development of the aeroplane, expanding communications networks and a growing sense of cosmopolitanism, the re-shaping of philosophy and moral outlooks). In the history of French poetry, he stands as an ungainly and genial Colossus, with one foot in an established order and the other in adventure (a duality summed up in the poem La jolie rousse): fondly attached to the oldest lyrical traditions (singing ballads of lost love and faithless hearts or laments on the passage of time), but allying himself fervently with all the artistic experiments of the Cubist period (the shattering of reality and its recomposition in surprising shapes and angular juxtapositions). He is at the same time a poet belonging to a bygone age and the most dynamic symbol of his own era. He shows a fascination with the past, its myths and legends, its quaint anecdotes and old wives' tales, its strange little bits of erudition; and a desire to be at the forefront of the avant-garde, shaping the future and the new vision of things.

It is not surprising that one critic should have greeted Apollinaire's first major collection, Alcools (1913) by describing it as a bric-a-brac shop. Its hallmark is its heterogeneous quality.