Mai de guillaume apollinaire biography

Rome, 1880−Paris, 1918

The poet, playwright, writer, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire was a pivotal figure of the avant-garde in France, connecting artistic and literary circles in Paris especially during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He coined the term “cubism” in his preface to the catalogue for the 8th salon of the cercle d’art “Les Indépendants” in Brussels in 1911, and was one of the first critics to define the principles of Cubism in his essay Les peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters, 1913). He collected the works of Georges Braque, André Derain, Marie Laurencin and Pablo Picasso—the artists that figured most prominently within his “aesthetic meditations” on the “new spirit” of the age—and introduced readers to Cubist works reproduced in his review, Les soirées de Paris (1912–14).

Born in Rome to a Polish mother and an Italian father, Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki moved to Paris at the age of twenty. Between 1902, when he began to write for La Revue Blanche, and 1918, the year of his untimely death from the Spanish flu, Apollinaire was the foremost critic of his age, reviewing art, literature, theater, and ballet as a contributor to leading journals and newspapers Le Matin, Paris Journal, and Intransigeant. In addition to publishing erotic novels, fiction, and poetry, he edited several avant-garde literary journals, in which he championed the work of artists and writers within his inner circle, including Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Laurencin (with whom he had a five-year affair), Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. In 1912 Apollinaire co-founded the review Les soirées de Paris with writers André Billy, René Dalize, and André Salmon funded in part by the aristocratic patron Comte Étienne de Beaumont. In 1913 he published Les peintres cubistes, comprising a selection of his criticism published between 1905 and 1912, and Alcools, his first major collection of poetry, with Picasso’s

Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky) was born in Rome on August 26, 1880. He purposefully kept his parentage clouded in speculation but was most likely the illegitimate child of Angelica Kostrowitzky, a Polish woman, and an Italian army officer. He was raised in the French Riviera and was educated in Monaco and Nice.

In 1899, he moved to Paris. During his twenties, he worked for a bank as a clerk and kept company with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braques, Marc Chagall, Max Jacob, the composer Eric Satie, Marcel Duchamp, and Marie Laurencin, with whom he had a relationship. Apollinaire’s first collection of poetry, L’enchanteur pourrissant, was published in 1909, and his reputation as a poet was established in 1913 with the publication of the collection Alcools: Poèmes.

Apollinaire was an important part of several avant-garde movements in French literature and art at the start of the twentieth century. His influences include the Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière. His play La mamelles de Tirésias, which was later adapted as an opera by Francis Poulenc in 1947, is one of the earliest examples of Surrealism—a word he is credited for coining.

In 1914, Apollinaire decided to become a French national by enlisting in the infantry during World War I. He was stationed on the front in Champagne until 1916, when he suffered a head wound and returned to Paris. Despite poor health, he continued writing, publishing the poetic manifesto L’esprit nouveau et les poètes in 1917 and writing Calligrammes, a collection of concrete poetry, which would not be published until after his death.

In 1918, Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb. Shortly thereafter, he died in Paris on November 9, 1918, having been one of the casualties of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Born on the 26th August 1880 in Rome, Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky was 18 years old when he arrived in the French capital before travelling to Germany as an advisor. Under the name Guillaume Apollinaire (his French Christian name), he soon became involved in the avant-garde literary movement. After having contributed to the Revue Blanche, in 1903 he founded his own review entitled Le Festin d'Esope. The cafés along the boulevard Saint-Germain and Montparnasse, the "Lapin Agile" cabaret and the "Bateau-Lavoir" artistes' workshop became popular meeting places with the likes of Picasso, Alfred Jarry, Vlaminck and Max Jacob etc. As well as his erotic works and art critiques for L'Intransigeant and Le Mercure de France, Apollinaire showed an interest in symbolic poetry. Derain illustrated his first book of prose, L'Enchanteur Pourrissant. In 1912, he was involved in founding the Soirées de Paris review. His break-up with Marie Laurençin, his partner since 1909, was the inspiration for his famous Pont Mirabeau.

"Under the Mirabeau bridge runs the Seine And our love affairs Must I be reminded that Joy always came after suffering."

The audacity of cubism, an important contemporary art movement, captivated Apollinaire, who defended it in his articles and sought to translate it into poetry, giving the latter a disjointed form. In 1913, following the issue of books on this pictorial school of painting, the publication of Alcools, which did not contain a single punctuation mark, made him famous.

In 1914, he shared in the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Montparnasse, spent time in Normandy and on the Côte d'Azur and was to meet Louise de Coligny-Chatillon, known as Lou, for whom he would write his famous letters. When the call-up came, he requested his naturalisation and on the 6th December he joined the 38th campaign artillery regiment in Nîmes. Transferred to the front in 1915, he fought in the Champagne region, where he was to beco

Guillaume Apollinaire's real name was Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky. He belonged to a cosmopolitan family and received a cosmopolitan education. He was a protean writer—in turn a futurist, a cubist, and a surrealist—a modernist in short. He was a friend of Picasso and like him an admirer of African art. Apollinaire became famous above all as an avant-garde poet with Alcools (1913), made up of both traditional and experimental poems deprived of punctuation, and Calligrammes (1918), also called "idéogrammes lyriques," which belonged to his cubist period. He thought poetry should enjoy the same liberty as journalism, but considered free verse only one of many possible innovations. He could turn any object, any topic, into something rich and strange.

The poems of Apollinaire are both serious and whimsical, and he was fond of hoaxes, one of which he perpetrated in the Mercure de France (to which he was a regular contributor) in the 1 April 1913 (April Fools' Day) issue. Although Apollinaire was neither a disciple of Whitman nor a homosexual, he pretended to quote an anonymous witness of Whitman's funeral in Camden, according to whom "pederasts came in crowds" and indulged in all kinds of rowdy activities to celebrate the death of their fellow homosexual. This pseudo-report was taken seriously by readers, and a controversy followed, which lasted for ten months in the pages of the Mercure de France as well as in other journals, until 1 February 1914. Stuart Merrill and Léon Bazalgette, the author of a romanticized biography of Whitman, denied the American poet's homosexuality, whereas Harrison Reeves and the German Eduard Bertz confirmed it. The whole controversy has been described by Henry Saunders and Betsy Erkkila. Federico García Lorca may have had Apollinaire's description of Whitman's funeral in mind when he composed his "Oda a Walt Whitman" in 1929–1930 during his stay in New York. (This poem is part of his Poeta en