Guillaume Apollinaire Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Identity
Guillaume Apollinaire was born Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome on August 26, 1880, to a Polish mother, Angelika Kostrowicka. Of mixed and cosmopolitan background, he spent parts of his youth in Italy and on the French Riviera before settling in Paris. The complexity of his name and origins prefigured the creative reinvention that marked his literary life: by the time he emerged as a public figure, he had adopted the French form Guillaume Apollinaire and chosen French as the language of his art. The ambiguities surrounding his paternity and his peripatetic childhood both sharpened his sensitivity to belonging, language, and identity, concerns that would echo through his poetry and criticism.

Paris and the Avant-Garde
Apollinaire arrived in Paris around the turn of the century and quickly found his way into the ferment of Montmartre and Montparnasse. He became a central node in a network of painters, poets, and provocateurs who were remaking modern art. His closest friendships included Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose experiments coalesced into Cubism; he championed their work as a critic and coined the term Orphism for the radiant color abstractions of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. He admired the outsider painter Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier) and helped secure Rousseau a place in the avant-garde pantheon. He moved among poets and writers such as Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Andre Salmon, and he shared a long, formative relationship with the painter Marie Laurencin, whose portraits and presence permeate his verse. This was the milieu that refined his critical voice and gave him material and allies for the transformation of modern letters.

Critic, Catalyst, and Public Figure
Apollinaire was not only a poet but also one of the era's sharpest art critics, writing incisive articles and essays that helped audiences navigate radical change. His book Les Peintres cubistes (1913) was among the first sustained interpretations of Cubism, explaining fragmented perspective as a new way of seeing rather than a scandal. He frequented the salons where Gertrude Stein and others debated the future of literature and painting, though his center of gravity remained in the bohemian studios and cheap cafes where Picasso, Braque, Andre Derain, and Amedeo Modigliani traded ideas. In 1911 he was briefly jailed in the wake of the Mona Lisa theft because of his acquaintance with the adventurer Geery Pieret, who had stolen Iberian sculptures from the Louvre. Apollinaire returned some of the objects; the episode led the police to question Picasso as well. The incident embarrassed but did not silence him; it underscored his closeness to artists at the heart of the new visual language.

Poetry and Prose
His literary reputation rests first on Alcools (1913), a book that drew on a decade of poems and announced a modern lyric stripped of punctuation, infused with urban rhythms, memory, and myth. The collection ranges from the landmark opening poem Zone to elegies and songs that reframe tradition with bold, swift imagery. Apollinaire also explored concise fables in Le Bestiaire ou Cortege d'Orphee, collaborating with Raoul Dufy on woodcuts, and he experimented with prose in works like L'Enchanteur pourrissant and Le Poete assassine. He was versatile and sometimes scandalous: he wrote erotic fiction, including Les Onze Mille Verges and Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan, which circulated under a cloud of notoriety. His late collection Calligrammes (1918) united visual form and text, arranging poems on the page as images, rain, doves, and landscapes, so that reading became seeing, a gesture consistent with his alliances with the painters of his circle.

War, Love, and Reinvention
When the First World War began, Apollinaire volunteered to serve France, even before he was naturalized a French citizen in 1916. He experienced trench warfare and later was wounded by shrapnel in the head in 1916, an injury that required trepanation and left lasting effects. The war intensified both his vulnerability and his urgency. His correspondences with Lou (Louise de Coligny-Chatillon) and with Madeleine Pages, to whom he was once engaged, testify to a dazzling and desperate sensibility that fused desire, humor, and terror. Much of Calligrammes bears the subtitle Poems of Peace and War, 1913-1916, giving formal shape to his wartime experience and pioneering the fusion of typographical experiment with lyric intimacy.

Coining Surrealism and Theatrical Ventures
Apollinaire's restless imagination extended to the stage. In 1917, he coined the word surrealism, applying it to new possibilities in art and theater. He used the term in connection with his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias), a satirical, gender-bending drama that challenged social conventions and anticipated the liberation of the imagination. In the same season he advocated for ballet and theater collaborations that brought together Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Picasso, helping to usher multidisciplinary modernism into public view. His sense that creativity could exceed realism without abandoning clarity helped set the tone for the movement that Andre Breton later organized as Surrealism.

Marriage, Final Months, and Death
In 1918 Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb, a union that promised a new steadiness after the turbulence of illness and war. That year he prepared new publications and saw his influence spreading among younger writers and artists. However, the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe during the final months of the war struck him down. He died in Paris on November 9, 1918, just two days before the Armistice. The jubilant crowds that filled the streets muffled the mourning of friends like Picasso, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, and many others who had relied on his critical advocacy and drawn courage from his experimental audacity.

Legacy and Influence
Apollinaire's legacy rests on his power to synthesize traditions into a fresh, modern idiom and to articulate a vision of the arts in which poetry, painting, theater, and music formed a unified field of experiment. He gave language to Cubism for a general audience, coined surrealism as a horizon for the imagination, and pushed typography and page design into the realm of poetic meaning. His friendships, with Picasso, Braque, the Delaunays, Laurencin, Jacob, Cendrars, Salmon, and others, were not adornments but engines of his thought; he listened to painters as intently as to poets and found in their canvases analogies for verse. By the time of his death, he had made himself indispensable: a poet of fierce tenderness and daring form, a critic who could persuade the skeptical, and a catalyst whose ideas positioned the future avant-garde. His books, from Alcools and Calligrammes to the essays on Cubism, remain points of entry into the bewildering abundance of early twentieth-century art, and his name endures as the figure who taught Europe how to read modernity.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Guillaume, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Deep - Hope - Art.

Other people realated to Guillaume: Gertrude Stein (Author), Paul Klee (Artist), Remy de Gourmont (Novelist), Paul Celan (Poet), Francis Picabia (Artist), Jacques Lipchitz (Sculptor), Raoul Dufy (Artist)