Authors: Guillaume Apollinaire

His formative years were largely spent in Monte Carlo and other fashionable resorts between which he and his mother traveled. He was educated in Nice and Cannes; later he attended school in Germany. Around 1900 he found himself in Paris, where he obtained employment as a bank clerk. His real interests were literary, however, and he soon made his way into the bohemian world of Montmartre. By 1903 he was able to support himself entirely through his writing. He also became involved in avant-garde movements, notably Futurism and cubism.

Apollinaire was a large man, powerful physically, and is said to have resembled a dissolute Roman emperor in appearance. He became an exemplar of French bohemianism and one of Montmartre’s most flamboyant personalities. He delighted in his lurid background, constantly embroidered it with fanciful details, and made it a largely unverifiable legend. He was warm, colorful, bombastic, and full of enthusiasm. As a writer, he was eager to explore and to experiment with form and structure; he wrote poetry, edited journals, and expressed himself forcefully through criticism, essays, fiction (including at least two pornographic novels), and two plays. Apollinaire saw himself as a modern counterpart of the vagabond rogue and poet François Villon, but he was actually a competent scholar, and his poetry is highly cerebral. It is also inventive, kinetic, and often unintelligible: It reflected the artistic trends of the time as expressed in avant-garde painting. To critic William A. Drake it is a mixture of “ribald exuberance, genial madness, grotesque inspiration, and pure imprudence.” It was at the same time a fresh and valid approach to reality. Two volumes in particular, Alcools and Calligrammes, have secured his reputation as a poet; his play The Breasts of Tiresias is generally accepted as having initiated the movement that came to be known as Surrealism. Robert Motherwell calls attention to the fact that Apollinaire “invented the word surréalisme, literally ‘superrealism,’ as a descriptive subtitle” for Les Mammelles de Tirésias.

Although he was an innovator and a significant artist in his own right, Apollinaire’s greatest role, perhaps, was as a discoverer of talents and as an influence on others. He is generally credited with the introduction of such outstanding painters as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Rousseau to general critical attention. Able to recognize greatness, he could also publicize it effectively. His book The Cubist Painters was reviewed by Pär Lagerkvist in Svenska Dagbladet and served its reviewer’s successful campaign for Swedish literature to strike out on the path of cubistic modernism.

Apollinaire’s promising career was brought to a tragic conclusion by the advent of World War I. Like many another poet and artist of the day, he was a romantic; like them, he marched off to defend his adopted country. He went to the front as an artillery officer, transferring to aviation at his first opportunity, and continued to write poems as circumstances permitted. He was seriously wounded on three occasions; the last of these injuries was caused by a bullet that passed through his head. He was slowly recovering from it when he was struck down by the influenza epidemic, dying just before the armistice. He had been married to Jacqueline Kolb only since that May.

Since his untimely death numerous volumes of previously unpublished material have appeared. These include poetry, essays, and letters, and they have served to round out the body of his work. In addition, they have helped to extend his influence through succeeding generations of French poets and to ensure his literary permanence.