Apollinaire, Guillaume

(1880-1918)

(Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzy)

   poet

   A poet, novelist, dramatist, and art and literary critic who is believed to have coined the term "surrealist," Guillaume Apollinaire, as he is known, was a leader of the avant-garde in paris in the early 20th century. Born wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzy, in Rome, the natural son of an italian officer and Angelica de Kostrowitzy, the daughter of a Polish noble in the papal court, Apollinaire studied for a time in schools in Cannes and Nice before settling in Paris (1902). After some minor jobs there, he took a post as a tutor in the Rhineland, which allowed him to travel throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Upon returning to Paris, he submitted his writings to various literary revues (La Revue blanche, La Plume) and became a friend of several symbolist writers. in 1909, his first book, L'Enchanteur pourrisant, was published. in the symbolist spirit, it reflects the idea that the imagination is the source of all ideas. Apollinaire also championed cubism and the cubists, and was a friend of many artists, including Picasso, and wrote of their works (Les Peintres cubistes, méditations esthétiques, 1913). He was fascinated by the relationship among the arts, especially poetry and painting, and his own poems are themselves very pictorial (Calligrames: poèmes de la paix et de la guerre, 1918). Apollinaire's writings also reflect his fascination with the modern world. The Eiffel Tower, airplanes, and cosmopolitanism are among the motifs in his great collection, Alcools, poèmes (1913). In his novel, Le Poète assassiné (1913), he rejected 19th-century realism and wrote a work of fantasy and satire. His play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917) anticipates both surrealism and the theater of the absurd. it had a significant influence on such dramatists as Artaud and Ionesco. Apollinare, who was wildly inconsistent in all but one thing—his intellectual commitment to the avant-garde—lived a life of controversy (it was typical of him that he spent a few days in jail on suspicion of having stolen the Mona Lisa). And it was characteristic also of him that he should have died two days before the armistice of World War I — of influenza in the 1918 pandemic. Apollinaire's other works include the novels L'Hérésiarque et Cie (1910), La Bestiare ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911) and La Femme assise (1920), a collection of poems (Vitam impendere amore, 1917) and Le Flâneur des deux rives (1917). His Oeuvres complètes was published in 1966.