Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire (born in Rome, 26 August 1880; died in Paris, 9 November 1918) was a poet, playwright and art critic who wrote in French, although he was born in Italy and grew up speaking several languages. His birth name was Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki, and the name he adopted is a French version of his first names. He is one of the key figures for understanding early twentieth-century poetry: he was among the first champions of Cubism, coined terms such as "Surrealism", and experimented with poetic forms that broke with tradition.

He was the illegitimate son of a Polish-Lithuanian noblewoman and of a Swiss-Italian father who never acknowledged him. He spent his childhood in Monaco, Cannes and Nice, where he attended several schools without taking his baccalaureate. In 1900 he settled in Paris, then the centre of European artistic life. To make ends meet he tutored and worked as a clerk on the stock exchange, while publishing art criticism in magazines and mixing with painters and writers in Montmartre and Montparnasse. His circle included Picasso, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Marie Laurencin, with whom he had a romantic relationship.

His first published book, in 1909, was a tale of a fabulous character based on the legend of Merlin and Vivien. His poetry collections Bestiary, or The Cortege of Orpheus (1911) and Alcools (1913) still bore traces of Symbolism, yet already introduced major formal innovations. He also edited classic erotic literature and wrote erotic novels, which brought him notoriety in literary circles. As a critic he defended Cubism in The Cubist Painters (1913), presenting it as a move beyond realism.

In 1911 he was arrested for a few days over the theft of statuettes from the Louvre, in which a former secretary of his was involved; the Mona Lisa was stolen in a separate episode and he had no link to it. When the First World War broke out he enlisted as a volunteer and was seriously wounded in the head in 1916, an injury from which he never fully recovered. During his convalescence he wrote much of his theatre, and in 1917 he used the word "surrealist" to describe the ballet Parade and the play The Breasts of Tiresias. In 1918 he published Calligrammes, in which the typography shapes objects out of the poem's own words, an experiment now seen as a forerunner of visual poetry.

Apollinaire died in Paris in November 1918, of the influenza that swept Europe at the time. He was buried in Père-Lachaise and was posthumously honoured as "Died for France". His legacy runs through twentieth-century avant-garde: his pursuit of formal freedom, his defence of new art and his belief that imagination should be the source of creation shaped the Surrealists who admired him, such as André Breton, and later experimental poets.