In 1913, Apollinaire published Alcohols, his first important collection, which gathered fifteen years of poetry. While he was then influenced by a symbolism of decline, he distinguished himself with bold innovations: punctuation disappeared and recent inventions, such as aircraft and automobile, made their debut in poetry. Alcohols is a contrasting work, where the Eiffel Tower and Mirabeau Bridge are surrounded by fields of colchic and legendary forests, where the agitation of progress mixes with the consecrated motifs of lost love and time. These poems, sometimes clear as the sound of the Rhine bells, sometimes dark as the jails of the Health prison, open the way for a new lyricism. Divided between tradition and modernity, they reflect the bubbling creativity of an era about to tip into the chaos of the Great War.