During one of the darkest periods of the Second World War, Francis Poulenc turned again to the verses of Guillaume Apollinaire. This groundbreaking poet numbered Picasso and Braque among his friends, and coined the word "cubism." One of the most important poets in France in the early twentieth century, he helped shape the new direction of French literature, moving it away from the preciousness and indirect glances of symbolism toward a more robust, urbanized exploration of life, especially the life of Poulenc's beloved birthplace, Paris. Although Apollinaire died of wounds suffered in World War I, Poulenc had met him once or twice, and remembered the cadence of Apollinaire's speech until the end of his life. Poulenc's first group of songs, the cycle Le Bestiare, was set to texts by Apollinaire.

Poulenc later wrote that he had long planned to set "Sanglots" and "Fagnes de Wallonie." Then he reread "Hôtel" and "Voyage à Paris" in old literary journals he had saved since his teenage years and decided the time was right. The absolute silliness of the latter poem delighted him, and the appeal of a text like "Hôtel" is obvious. Poulenc handles these two songs deftly. Surely nothing could be more luxuriantly indolent than the setting of "Hôtel"; the last four chords evaporate into the air like a curl of tobacco smoke. "Voyage à Paris" is an example of Poulenc at his most carnivalesque, with its bawdy, clownish introduction and its vocal line that can only be called a tune even though it is not without chromatic quirkiness. The heaths of "Fagnes de Wallonie" are found in Belgium, on a high, windswept plateau. Poulenc's setting for this somewhat fierce text flies by, as he himself notes at the beginning, "extremely quickly, in a single bound." The proto-surrealist scene at the Orkenise city gates where the handsome guards proudly knit elicits a setting Poulenc notes as "frank, in a folk-song style." Its skipping duplet articulation in the right hand of the piano is repeated in "Fagnes de Wallonie," while at the words, "Love intoxicates, carter," Poulenc doubles the vocal line in an inner part of the accompaniment just as he later does in "Sanglots." Such transient, almost hidden doublings are frequent elements of Poulenc's songs. "Sanglots" is arguably one of Poulenc's most moving vocal pieces. Following on the heels of the flamboyant finale of "Voyage à Paris," its beginning (marked "very calm") is clear and wistful. As the speaker recalls his heartbreak, as well as the joyous times that preceded it, the setting gradually grows in depth and intensity, exchanging a thinly "scored" accompaniment for one of great density and harmonic richness. Poulenc's profound love for the poetry of Apollinaire and others of his generation translated into a sophisticated and sensitive ability to set that poetry to music in ways that both honor and illuminate the texts.

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