Guillaume Apollinaire

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Apollinaire, drawing by Pablo Picasso from the frontispiece to Calligrammes, 1918 (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Aug. 26, 1880, Rome?, Italy — died Nov. 9, 1918, Paris, Fr.) French poet of Polish-Italian birth. Arriving in Paris at age 20, Apollinaire always kept his early years obscure. In his short life he took part in all the avant-garde movements that flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. His poetry was characterized by daring, even outrageous, technical experiments. Because of his efforts to create an effect of surprise by means of unusual verbal associations and word patterns, he is often considered the herald of Surrealism. His poetic masterpiece was Alcools (1913). His death resulted from a head wound received in World War I.

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a great French lyric poet. A leading figure in the avant-garde before World War I, he produced criticism and theortical writings that have significantly influenced esthetic movements from cubism to those of the present day.

Guillaume Apollinaire was the pseudonym of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky, the illegitimate son of an Italian army officer and a young Polish noblewoman. He was born in Rome on Aug. 26, 1880, and brought up in various towns in southern France where his mother happened to be sojourning. In 1899 Apollinaire went to Paris to live and, without money or diplomas, had difficulty. However, between odd jobs as a literary hack, tutor, bank clerk, and journalist, he managed to travel on the Continent and make two trips to London. Also he had a few love affairs that later figured in his poetry.

The most important aspect of Apollinaire's first years in Paris was his encounter with writers and artists. Jovial and full of enthusiasm, he became the welcome companion of the young modernists in the Bohemia of the day. He helped found little reviews and wrote articles defending what later was dubbed cubism. He wrote fiction, too, and poems that appeared in magazines, ultimately published in 1913 in a volume entitled Alcools (Alcohols). The originality of these poems lies more in the subtle handling of image and rhythm to express emotion than in technical innovation. Yet in correcting the proofs, Apollinaire rubbed out all punctuation and placed at the head of the collection a quite recent poem called "Zone," which is a sort of manifesto of modernism and, in form, less orthodox than the others.

When war broke out in 1914, Apollinaire enlisted and found in combat new themes of poetic inspiration. Wounded in 1916, he was sent back to Paris, where the generation of future Dadaists and surrealists greeted him as a chief. In the following year the presentation of The Breasts of Tiresias, a burlesque play very much in the modern mood, and a lecture on the "new spirit" gave him considerable notoriety.

His second volume of verse, Calligrammes, appeared in 1918. Here Apollinaire demonstrates in metrical innovations the modernism which he preached for poetry in "Zone." There are poems made of snatches of conversation, of enumeration, and of simple notation which infuse daily banalities with lyrical magic. There are the "ideograms," which give the volume its title - "visual" poems which imitate, in typography and in placement on the page, the subject matter.

The year 1918 was one of fulfillment for Apollinaire as an artist and a person. Hitherto unfortunate in love, particularly with the painter Marie Laurencin, he found happiness with Jacqueline Kolb, the "beautiful redhead" of the last poem in Calligrammes. They married in May. Six months later, at the age of 38, Apollinaire died of influenza in Paris.

Further Reading

A bilingual edition of Alcools was published in 1965 by the University of California Press. Francis Steegmuller provided the fullest biography, Apollinaire, Poet among the Painters (1963). Scott Bates, Guillaume Apollinaire (1967), enhanced by a bibliography and appendixes, is primarily devoted to an analysis of the poetry but is hampered by exclusive use of English translation. See also Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1933, trans. 1950).

Additional Sources

Adlard, John., One evening of light mist in London: the story of Annie Playden and Guillaume Apollinaire, Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1980.

Couffignal, Robert., Apollinaire, University: University of Alabama Press, 1975.

Steegmuller, Francis, Apollinaire: poet among the painters, Boston, MA: Nonpareil Books, 1980, 1963; New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Apollinaire, Guillaume (pseudonym of Wilhelm‐Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, 1880–1918), French poet and critic. Although he was a central figure in the Parisian avant garde prior to World War I, the fairy tradition influenced his early literary experiments. A precursor to the surrealists, he coined the motto, ‘J'émerveille’ (‘I marvel’), and treated marvellous themes like ‘Lorelei’ (in Alcools, 1913) and ‘The Wandering Jew’ (‘Le Passant de Prague’ in L'Hérésiarque et cie, 1910) in poetry and prose. Fascinated by the Arthurian cycle, Apollinaire based L'Enchanteur pourrissant (The Rotting Sorcerer, 1909), and ‘Merlin et la vieille femme’ (‘Merlin and the Old Lady’ in Alcools, 1913) on the figure of Merlin. The last work he ever wrote was a unique fairy tale entitled ‘La Suite de Cendrillon, ou le rat et les six lézards’ (‘Cinderella Continued, or The Rat and the Six Lizards’), and was published in La Baïonette on 16 January 1919, after his death.

— Amy Ransom

Apollinaire, Guillaume (pseud. of Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky) (1880-1918). Born in Rome, the illegitimate child of a Vatican nobleman, who never recognized him, and a Finnish-born mother of Polish origin but Russian nationality, Apollinaire's early years were veiled in an often deliberate obscurity, and until he joined the French army in 1915 his identity papers described him as an ‘Italo-Russe’. After a childhood spent in Monaco and Cannes, his subsequent wanderings from one casino town to another with a younger brother, mother, and a succession of ‘uncles’ inspired aspects of Gide's Lafcadio and provided the future poet with a rich fund of dialect and folklore. When tutor to an aristocratic German family in the Rhineland, he met the English woman Annie Playden who was to mark so much of his early poetry, as was the painter Marie Laurencin with whom he had a stormy relationship in his early years in Paris. By 1911 his unorthodox background and avant-garde activities were such that, on the flimsiest of pretexts, he was briefly imprisoned for the theft of the Mona Lisa. An early champion of all that was new in poetry and painting, he was an unlikely recruit to the army, serving first in the artillery and subsequently, as a lieutenant, in the infantry. Invalided out, he married Jacqueline Kolb (‘la jolie rousse’) shortly before his death.

Although in recent years much more substantial attention has been paid to his other achievements, Apollinaire's reputation still rests principally on the two main collections of lyric poetry published in his lifetime—Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918). But, perhaps fittingly for one who was an active colleague of the artistic avant-garde in the years before World War I, his first published collection of poems was a series of short and often humorous verses, illustrated by Raoul Dufy's woodcuts: Le Bestiaire, ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911). He was a friend of the Cubists, and although his contribution to the early debate surrounding their art—Les Peintres cubistes (1913)—was later dismissed by several among them, notably Picasso, it remains what its originally intended title (Méditations esthétiques) proclaimed it to be: a collection of essays which attempts the evocation of the spirit of painting through words.

His early death from a combination of Asian influenza and the aftermath of a head wound sustained in the trenches seemed to leave his posthumous standing as a leader of the avant-garde at the mercy of those who wished to take on this mantle themselves; he was accused of lacking sufficient audacity, of having failed to break free from the dead conventions of literature, by Breton, Aragon, and others. In an ironic parallel, more conservative opinion, while dismissing the experimental in his writing, valued the octosyllabic verses and shorter lyrics which undoubtedly make him one of the great French poets. Others, such as Cendrars, were to allow his role as innovator to be undermined by charges of plagiarism.

Apart from personal factors, such controversy stems mainly from the multiplicity of readings which his poetry invites, not only through its variety of form and texture (Calligrammes has many poems written in the shape of objects), but also through its much more profoundly enigmatic nature. From the earliest poems of Alcools, which present a drama of the psyche in a mythical landscape imbued with Arthurian legend, to the last long poems of Calligrammes, there is a constant exploding of that unity of self which is normally found in lyrics of personal sensibility. At the same time the external universe seems to offer an immanent, if hermetic, meaning which is striven fro from ‘Merlin et la vieille femme’ to the final verses of ‘Les Collines’. While much scholarship has stressed the diversity of influences and heteroclite nature of his verse, it is impossible not to be aware of the strand of continuity in this poetry of exploration of self-in-the-world which Apollinaire produced at all stages of his life. It reveals the self as fractured subject whether in the lines of ‘La Chanson du mal aimé’, his earliest masterpiece, or the war poems such as ‘Fête’.

An equally constant and paradoxically unifying strand in his poetry is his desire to make the language of his verse reflect the diversity of his experience and the often arcane nature of his erudition. Together with his friend Fernand Fleuret he produced the first catalogue of the Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and an intimate knowledge of writers such as Aretino and Sade is visible, though often in oblique fashion, in his work. Yet it was not only from the library shelf that he drew; his personal experience of Italian, particularly Roman, life and folklore, as well as the dialects and legends of Wallonia, the traditions and tales of the Rhineland, the rest of Germany, Czechoslovakia, provincial France, Monaco, and so forth made his poetry a dazzling and sometimes bewildering assemblage of fragments, which led to Duhamel's dismissal of Alcools at the time of its publication as a ‘boutique de brocanteur’. The jibe would have been better aimed at the residues of symbolism from which Apollinaire was trying to set free a new lyricism, and it is this liberation which remains the major achievement of Alcools.

Calligrammes, subtitled ‘Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre’, while containing much that is inspired from the same sources as the poems of Alcools—love affairs, encounters with the modern world and modern art—deserves also to be recognized as the finest poetic achievement of World War I. Although a certain poetic record of the experience of the war remains in French, there is no equivalent of the group of poets (Owen, Sassoon, etc.) who define a moment in the history of English verse. Apollinaire is the only substantial poet in French whose work tries to engage with the business of being at war. His war poems have their moments of ‘poetry in the pity’, as is the case with ‘Exercice’, for example, and they have their moments of what may seem a crude jingoism and, worse, a personal revelling in military life, yet even at their most rebarbative for the pacifist, these poems not only record ‘l'histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire | Qui fut à la guerre et sut être partout’, they allow the reader to experience all aspects of the soldier's life and to place them in both a modern and a mythical context. They are never as naïve in their glorification of the warrior as some of Apollinaire's own letters (particularly the Lettres à Lou) might have led certain readers to suppose, and in their language they follow his constant habit of opening the poetic to the everyday and the modern in a way that is absolutely consistent with his pre-war aesthetic.

As a prose writer Apollinaire was inventive and highly unorthodox. He began as an anonymous pornographer but went on to put his name to the picturesque and inventive stories of L'Hérésiarque et Cie (1910), the whimsical and partly autobiographical Le Poète assassiné (1916), as well as La Femme assise (1920), which has been claimed as an early precursor of the Nouveau Roman. His verse drama Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1918) might have been the beginning of a theatrical career in keeping with the invention and iconoclasm of the period. But it is his lasting achievement to have invented—perhaps with Cendrars—the first poetry, the first poetic language, of 20th-c. France.

[Ian Revie]

Bibliography

• F. Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (1963)
• M.-L. Lentengre, Apollinaire et le nouveau lyrisme (1984)
• T. Mathews, Reading Apollinaire (1987)

Quotes:

"Come to the edge, He said. They said, We are afraid. Come to the edge, He said. They cam. He pushed them... and they flew."

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."

"I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts."

"A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature."

"Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman."

"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere."

See more famous quotes by Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire
Born	26 August 1880(1880-08-26) Rome, Italy1
Died	9 November 1918 (aged 38) Paris, France
Occupation	Poet, Writer, Art critic

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: [ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; Rome, August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918, Paris) was a French poet, writer and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.

Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word "surrealism" and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera).

Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died at age 38, a victim of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 Notes 4 References 5 External links

Life

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Born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky and raised speaking French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman born near Navahrudak (now in Belarus). Apollinaire's father is unknown but may have been Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss Italian aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. Apollinaire was partly educated in Monaco.

Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators in that period included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Alexandra Exter, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist movement.

On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later. Apollinaire then implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning in the art theft, but he was also exonerated.^[1]

He fought in World War I and, in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he 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's status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest spirit that ever existed."

The war-weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

Works

Portrait by Maurice de Vlaminck, 1903

Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. 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.

In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into a movie in 1987.

Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing, was published.

In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in Belgium, but mastered the Walloon dialect sufficiently to write poetry through that medium, some of which has survived.

Poetry:

• Le bestiaire ou le cortège d’Orphée, 1911
• Alcools, 1913
• Vitam impendere amori', 1917
• Calligrammes, poèmes de la paix et de la guerre 1913-1916, 1918 (published shortly after Apollinaire's death)
• Il y a..., 1925
• Julie ou la rose, 1927
• Ombre de mon amour, poems addressed to Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, 1947
• Poèmes secrets à Madeleine, pirated edition, 1949
• Le Guetteur mélancolique, previously unpublished works, 1952
• Poèmes à Lou, 1955
• Soldes, previously unpublished works, 1985
• Et moi aussi je suis peintre, album of drawings for Calligrammes, from a private collection, published 2006

Prose:

Muse Inspiring the Poet. Portrait of Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, by Henri Rousseau, 1909

• Mirely ou le Petit Trou pas cher, 1900
• "Que faire?",
• Les Onze Mille Verges ou les amours d'un hospodar, 1907
• L'enchanteur pourrissant, 1909
• L'Hérèsiarque et Cie (short story collection), 1910
• Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan, 1911
• La Rome des Borgia, 1914
• La Fin de Babylone - L'Histoire romanesque 1/3, 1914
• Les Trois Don Juan - L'Histoire romanesque 2/3, 1915
• Le poète assassiné, 1916
• La femme assise, 1920
• Les Épingles (short story collection), 1928

Plays:

• Les Mamelles de Tirésias, play, 1917
• La Bréhatine, screenplay (collaboration with André Billy), 1917
• Couleurs du temps, 1918
• Casanova, published 1952

Articles:

• Le Théâtre Italien, illustrated encyclopedia, 1910
• Pages d'histoire, chronique des grands siècles de France, chronicles, 1912
• Méditations esthétiques. Les peintres cubistes, 1913
• La Peinture moderne, 1913
• L'Antitradition futuriste, manifeste synthèse, 1913
• Case d'Armons, 1915
• L'esprit nouveau et les poètes, 1918
• Le Flâneur des Deux Rives, chronicles, 1918

Notes

1. ^ Time Magazine, STEALING THE MONA LISA, 1911. Consulted on August 15, 2007.

References

• Apollinaire, Marcel Adéma, 1954
• Apollinaire, Poet among the Painters, Francis Steegmuller, 1963, 1971, 1973
• Apollinaire, M. Davies, 1964
• Guillaume Apollinaire, S. Bates, 1967
• Guillaume Apollinaire, P. Adéma, 1968
• The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck, 1968
• Apollinaire, R. Couffignal, 1975
• Guillaume Apollinaire, L.C. Breuning, 1980
• Reading Apollinaire, T. Mathews, 1987
• Guillaume Apollinaire, J. Grimm, 1993

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Guillaume Apollinaire

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Guillaume Apollinaire

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Guillaume Apollinaire

• Official site
• The Musician of Saint-Merry (a poem) at New Translations (English)
• Works by Guillaume Apollinaire at Project Gutenberg
• Ebooks from Apollinaire in french at Livres & Ebooks
• Poemas de Apollinaire en español:
• Guillaume Apollinaire at amediavoz.com
• Audio recording of Apollinaire reading his poem "Le Pont Mirabeau"
• English verse translation of Le Pont Mirabeau
• Apollinaire at ubuweb (includes examples of his work)
• The Exploits of a Young Don Juan an e-book (in French)
• Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan at the Internet Movie Database
• Les onze mille verges an e-book (in French)
• Apollinaire-rif at rifondou.walon.org (re. Walloon poetry]
• A digital rendition of Apollinaire's best known poem, "Il Pleut"
• Guillaume Apollinaire at Find a Grave

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