Top Questions
Guillaume Apollinaire was known for a number of masterful works. Arguably, his most well-known of these is ‘Zone,’ which was published in 1913. It describes a dream-like walk through Paris. Other notable poems written by him are ‘It’s Raining,‘ ‘Calligram,’ and ‘L’Adieu.’
Although Guillaume Apollinaire has become well connected to Paris and France as a whole, he was, in fact, born in Rome, Italy, in August of 1880. He came from Italian and Polish parents. Despite this, he still fought for France in WWI.
Apollinaire enlisted in the French military in December of 1914 and was deployed to the front lines by April 1915. However, his service was abruptly interrupted when, on March 17, 1916, he sustained a shrapnel injury to his temple. Despite undergoing trepanation, he was deemed unfit for further service and discharged from the army. Tragically, his health remained fragile due to the severity of his wound, and he succumbed to complications from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
He was inspired by the Symbolist movement, particularly the works of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. He was also heavily associated with Cubism, a movement that involved the likes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Tragically, in 1918, only a few years after he left the Great War, he was killed by the Spanish Flu pandemic.
Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, surrealist, playwright, novelist, and critic who showed his creativity during the early 20th century. He came from a Polish family and ended up fighting and surviving the Great War in the trenches of the French army. The Surrealist movement has a lot to thank him for, and he has become known as an avant-garde writer who coined the phrases Cubism, Orphism, and Surrealism. Among his peers, he was admired and was spoken about by the likes of Gertrude Stein, Louis Aragon, and Phillipe Soupault.
Early Life
Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome, Italy, in August of 1880. He was the son of a Polish mother and an Italian father, and his full name stretched to Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexander Apollinaire de Kostrowitzsky. While details about his youth are unclear, it is likely that his father was of aristocratic birth and spent very little to no time with his infant son. It has also been speculated that Apollinaire’s father was a military officer or a high-ranking member of the Church. His mother, Angelika Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman.
Although largely raised and educated in the French Riviera, Apollinaire’s youth was spent traveling throughout Europe, where he was able to meet a number of interesting personalities and develop an interest in various fields of study.
Guillaume Apollinaire One of the earliest poems that he wrote during this period, ‘Song of the Poorly Loved,’ became famous years later.
Paris and Cubism
He eventually settled in Paris in 1899, where he supported artists such as George Braques, Henri Rousseau, Max Jacob, and Pablo Picasso. He was widely known throughout artistic circles, so much so that he also collaborated with the likes of Marc Chagall, Eric Satie, Andre Derain, his later lover Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, he published the erotic novel the Eleven Thousand Rods, or Les Onze Mille Verges. The novel was banned in France until 1970 and was only one of a number of pornographic volumes attributed to Apollinaire. By 1909, his debut short story collections L’enchanteur pourrissant and L’heresiarque et cie (The Heresiarch and Co.) had been published.
He was intimately connected to an antagonistic culture that artistically revolted against bourgeois society and showed an interest in anarchism. In 1911, he became a member of the Puteaux Group of Cubists, and he was able to give the opening address to the Salon of 1912. The term ‘Surrealism’ began to circulate in his circle, and a ballet by Erik Satie, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Sergei Diaghilev called Parade
Between 1913 and 1918, Apollinaire built up a significant collection from an array of great painters and ethnographic artifacts. His collection included paintings from de Chirico, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. He stored the pieces at 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, his apartment.
Remarkably, in 1911, he was falsely subjected to a six-day stint in prison when he was accused of being involved with a plot to steal the Mona Lisa.
Later Life and Military Service
Apollinaire’s collection, Âlcools Poèmes, published in 1913, solidified his reputation and showed the great influence of Symbolism on his work. The same year, he published an essay, Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, about the Cubist painters.
Three years later, he joined the military and fought for France during World War I. After only a short period of time, while fighting at the front with the infantry, he suffered a head wound. Apollinaire was sent back to Paris soon after. His regular contributions to Temps and Paris-Midi remained despite fighting in a brutal war. In his last year of life, he lectured on modern art and staged the surrealist play Les Mamelles de Tiresias: Drame Surrealist (The Breasts of Tiresias). It was met with positivity and was adapted into a light opera by Francis Poulenc in 1947.
Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918, from Spanish influenza in Paris, only a few months after his marriage to Jacqueline Kolb.
