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 Pages, his fiancee, 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"...