The history of modern French poetry is the history of spaces and places, real and imaginary. Provinces, cities, villages, streets, fields, meadows, paths, gardens, mountains, rivers, streams, springs, hillsides, ravines, gorges, grottos, rocks, beaches – the geography and geology of France and its colonies offer to many different poets a habitat and a habitation, a sense of rooted identity, and an intense experience of the here-and-now of ordinary life with its momentary joys and sudden sadnesses, its ephemeral beauties and irreversible losses. Poetry, as Heidegger has written, ‘is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’.

Paris

The joy of the new machine age, heralded by the invention of the telegraph, automobile, and airplane, spills over into the streets and boulevards, the cafés and office buildings of the Paris Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) celebrates in his two major works Alcools (1912) and Calligrammes (1918). Apollinaire sees himself at the intersection of the old and the modern, of order and adventure, of tradition and innovation. Symbol of Apollinaire's metropolitan optimism is the Eiffel Tower; protectively, like a shepherd of Virgil's time, it watches over the Paris cityscape and its ‘flocks’ of ‘bleating’, honking cars. The Eiffel Tower's architecture of intersecting girders, its needlepoint spire penetrating the Parisian sky, and its paradoxical juxtaposition of iron solidity and airy openness express the old in terms of the absolutely new.