Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), poet par excellence of the early 20th century Parisian literary world, inventor of the word "surrealism," champion of cubism and other innovative forms of modern art, wrote The Poet Assassinated in a hospital bed recovering from shrapnel wounds inflicted during World War One.

Reading this novella is like entering a dream world of a De Chirico cityscape or the montage of Max Ernst – and every couple of paragraphs the surreal panorama shifts – one of the most unique reading experiences one can encounter. With Apollinaire we have truly transitioned from the naturalism of Zola and the decadence of Huysmans into the Eiffel Tower world of modernity. Hello Picasso, hello Cubism, hello Dali Surrealism.

Apollinaire’s novella is comprised of 18 micro-chapters, all with one-word titles, such as Name, Nobility, Pedagogy, Poetry, Love, Fashion – like 18 pieces of torn paper, dropped randomly but not too randomly, fluttering down on a blank mat. In order to have a more intimate feel for the tone of this bizarre, whimsical work, please view Entr’acte, a short French 1924 black-and-white film by René Clair (easily located on YouTube) and featuring three well-known surrealist artists: Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

How powerful is your imagination? The author provides the mythic outline of the life of our main character, the god-like, world conquering poet Croniamanta, a man born in a year where his birth was saluted with an erection – the Eiffel Tower (sexual image directly from the text) but Apollinaire invites us to fill in the blanks and create our own version of Croniamanta. After all, even the place of his birth is claimed by no less than 127 towns and 7 countries!

Respecting that mythic outline we are given the following: Croniamanta’s mother died in childbirth and his father put a gun to his head after losing a fortune in a Monaco casino. He was raised by a well-learned man urging him to love all of nature and schooling him in Greek and Latin, the French of Racine, the English of Shakespeare and the Italian of Petrarch. Also, he was introduced to fencing and horsemanship, so by age 15 Croniamanta imagined himself as both knight and lover. At 21, poems in hand and filled with a love of literature, Croniamanta sets off for Paris where his eyes devoured everything and he eventually smashed eternity to pieces.

The great poet proclaims he will never write a poem again that is not free of all shackles, even the shackles of language. Croniamanta then becomes famous but enemies of poetry are on the rise. At one point a prophet tells him the earth can no longer stand its contact with poets. This is born out with the discovery that the United States has started electrocuting people who claim poetry as a profession. To add to this horror, Germany forbids all poets from going outdoors and four countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal -- put all poets in jail. In Paris mobs are reported to have strangled poets in public.

Standing tall before an angry crowd, Croniamanta denounces all haters of poets as swine and murderers. But an angry crowd is an angry crowd; they turn on Croniamanta and kill him. In the aftermath a sculptor creates a monument to the great poet – a hole with reinforced concrete, the void in the ground has the shape of Croniamanta; the hole is filled but filled in a unique way: the hole is filled with Croniamanta’s phantom.

This brief sketch is like describing Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory as a number of flaccid watches out in the desert. This is surrealism; this is the realm of dreams; this is where the umbrella meets the sewing machine on the operating table; this is a novella by Guillaume Apollinaire. One is obliged to enter the work itself with fresh, open imagination.