Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire (
August 26,
1880 -
November 9,
1918) was a
poet,
writer, and art critic.
Born
Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky in
Rome,
Italy, he was one of the many great artists who worked in the
Montmartre district of
Paris during an era of great creativity. One of the most popular members of the artistic village at
Montparnasse, his friends and collaborators during that period were
Pablo Picasso,
Jean Cocteau,
Erik Satie, and
Ossip Zadkine.\n
In
1911, he joined the
Puteaux Group, an offshoot branch of the
Cubist movement.
Apollinaire's first collection of
poetry was
L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but it was
Alcools (1913) which established his reputation. These poems, influenced in part by the
symbolistss, juxtapose the old and the new, using traditional forms and modern imagery.
Also in
1913, Apollinaire published the
essay "Les Peintres cubistes" on the
cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term
orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of
Robert Delaunay and others.
He fought in
World War I and in
1916 was seriously wounded in the temple (see photo). While recovering from his wound, he wrote the
play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (
1917) (the subject of an
opera by
Francis Poulenc premiered in
1947), which he described as
surrealist, making it one of the first works to be so-described. He had earlier coined the word
surrealism in the program notes for
Jean Cocteau and
Erik Satie's
ballet Parade, first performed on
18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto,
L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes.
Apollinaire also wrote a well-known
pornographic novel,
Les Onze Mille Verges (
The Eleven Thousand Rods) in 1907. It was officially banned in France until 1970, although various printings of it had circulated widely for many years, and during his lifetime Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged his authorship.
The weakened Apollinaire died of
influenza during the
Spanish Flu pandemic of
1918. He was interred in the
Le Père Lachaise Cemetery,
Paris. Shortly after his death,
Calligrammes, a collection of his
concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect) was published.
External link
\n*http://www.wiu.edu/Apollinaire/\n* HREF="http://www.ubu.com/historical/app/app.html" class="external">Apollinaire at ubuweb (includes examples of his work)
Apollinaire, Guillaume\n\n
