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 the level of scientific invention; newness, which man can find within himself, exists, apart from progress, in science and especially in art."

Margaret Davies, reviewing the 1980 edition of Calligrammes for Modern Language Review, determines the collection to be a "fascinating labyrinth" of "very diverse material" that switches "from the inward turning of Alcools," a collection of Apollinaire's poems published in 1913, to an extroverted "enthusiasm." Davies identifies in Calligrammes "the radical dislocations and discontinuities that were the result of [Apollinaire's] search for simultaneity" and "the new type of 'lecture' which is solicited from the reader." She finds within the poems "the inevitable and continued Apollinarian ambiguities, which culminate in the final choice of anxiety and conflict as the essential condition of his aesthetic." The poems reveal the "interesting effects which can arise when the visual form actually contradicts the semantic message of the words."

In the introduction to the 1980 volume, S. I. Lockerbie concludes that Calligrammes is "the second major volume of poetry on which rests Guillaume Apollinaire's reputation as one of the great modern poets in French literature," Alcools being the first. The poems reveal "a novelty of accent and composition which clearly rests on aesthetic assumptions different from those underlying" his previous works. The assumptions "can conveniently be drawn together under the concept of modernism." Lockerbie states that the mood in these poems "reflects much greater confidence and enthusiasm for life" than those in Alcools, showing a change that resulted from "the rapid technological advances of the early years of the twentieth century and the general widening of horizons brought about by such inventions as the motorcar, the airplane, radiography, cinematography, and radio communications." Lockerbie concludes that "now [Apollinaire] seemed the triumphant master of his own destiny."

Anna Balakian, in her article on Apollinaire for Yale French Studies, writes that the poet's importance "lies not so much in being the originator of an attitude as in having stated it more provocatively and held to it more persistently than his contemporaries." Balakian argues that Apollinaire's "ideas on art did not remain in the realm of theories but were illustrated consciously in the major part of his poetic work."

In her review of Calligrammes, Balakian concludes that the collection "is a more striking example of [Apollinaire's] inventive approach to writing" than is his earlier collection, Alcools. Balakian finds that in Alcools, the poet displays a "vigorous imagination" that "often accepted the challenge of new vistas revealed by the inventions pertaining to the war." She adds that in Calligrammes, Apollinaire effectively uses "juxtaposition and discarded symmetry and order much more than in his previous works." The poems in Calligrammes are...