Reviews for Calligrammes, which includes “Always,” are positive for the original edition and remain so for subsequent editions. M. B. Markus, in his review of the 1980 edition for Library Journal, cites the “ebulliency and epic vision of the poems,” which “demonstrate Apollinaire's acceptance of World War I as a new realm of experience and creative possibility.” Markus notes that the poet “abandoned punctuation, syntax, linear and discursive style for free verse . . . and contemporary idiom.”

In her commentary on “Always,” Anne Hyde Greet concludes that the poem is one of Apollinaire's “prophetic” works, revealing “his old love of science-fiction imagery.” The paradoxical nature of the first two lines, Greet argues, is made clear in the philosophy of his lecture “L'Esprit nouveau et les poetes,” given in 1917. Greet writes that in this lecture Apollinaire declared that progress, “which is limited to the manipulation of external phenomena, exists on...