Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée

Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée is a poetic album of 30 short poems by Guillaume Apollinaire with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy, published in 1911.

Apollinaire published eighteen poems figuring all kinds of semi-mythical animals in 1908 in La phalange, an experimental journal and promised his readers an illustrated edition.

Several composers were inspired by these poems to set them to music: Francis Poulenc (1919), Louis Durey (1919), Jean Absil (1944) and others.

His friend Louis Durey composed a complete cycle (26 short songs; he omitted the poems about Orpheus).

Northern Irish composer Alan Mills set six of the poems to music (for baritone and piano) in 1985.