Apollinaire, Guillaume (1880-1918)

French poet of aristocratic Polish descent. He was a leader of the avant-garde in Parisian literary and artistic circles. His novel Le Poète assassiné/The Poet Assassinated (1916), followed by the experimental poems Alcools/Alcohols (1913) and Calligrammes/Word Pictures (1918), show him as a representative of the Cubist and Futurist movements.

Born in Rome and educated in Monaco, Apollinaire went to Paris 1898. His work greatly influenced younger French writers, such as Louis Aragon. He coined the term ‘surrealism’ to describe his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias/The Breasts of Tiresias (1917).

Alcools juxtaposes short lyrics, Symbolist elegies, and the ‘conversation poems’ and urban ironies of poetic modernism. Traditional rhetoric and discontinuity of form and tone are also displayed in Calligrammes, which contains love poems, war poems, manifesto poems, and ideograms.

Apollinaire's other writings include the fiction works L'Enchanteur pourrissant/The Putrescent Enchanter (1909) and L'Hérésiarque et Cie/The Heresiarch and Co. (1910); art criticism (‘Les Peintres cubistes/The Cubist Painters’ 1913); and erotic novels. Much of his work was published posthumously, comprising 15 volumes of poems and letters, 1920-69 (La Femme assise to Lettres à Lou).