Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a French poet, writer and art critic, a major figure of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Author notably of Alcools, Calligrammes and Poète assassiné, he occupies a central place in the renewal of modern poetry and in the artistic history of the years preceding the First World War.

Born in Rome under the name Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki, he spent part of his youth in Italy before settling in France. Drawn early on to literature and the arts, he frequented avant-garde circles in Paris and formed friendships with numerous artists, among them Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Marie Laurencin.

A poet of great formal freedom, Apollinaire published Alcools in 1913, an essential collection of modern French poetry. In it he blends lyricism, memory, myth, urban modernity and formal experimentation, notably removing all punctuation in the definitive version of the text. His writing seeks to reconcile the poetic heritage of the past with the transformations of the contemporary world.

A volunteer soldier during the First World War, he composed several of his war poems at the front. In June 1915, he produced Case d'Armons, an extraordinary booklet of twenty-one poems, calligraphed by his own hand and mimeographed "at the gun battery, before the enemy" with the help of two comrades. Printed in only 25 copies, this publication, now legendary in the history of bibliophily, would later be largely incorporated into Calligrammes.

An art critic attentive to new forms of creation, Apollinaire also championed Cubism and helped to spread the term "surrealism," which he used before the movement formed around André Breton.

Guillaume Apollinaire died in Paris in 1918, a victim of the Spanish flu. His body of work, brief but profoundly innovative, exerted a lasting influence on the poetry, art and avant-gardes of the twentieth century.