Guillaume Apollinaire
(August 26, 1880 - November 9, 1918) France
Poet
Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky was born in Rome. He purposefully kept his parentage clouded in speculation, but was most likely the illegitimate child of Angelica de Kostrowitzky, a Polish woman living in the Vatican. Apollinaire was raised in the gambling halls of Monaco, Paris, and the French Riviera; during his education in Cannes, Nice, and Monaco, he assumed the identity of a Russian prince. In his twenties he worked for a Parisian bank and kept company with artists such as Picasso, Braques, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, and his lover, Marie Laurencin. During this time, he published a number of semi-pornographic books, proclaiming that the writing of the Marquis de Sade would gain prominence in the new century.
 Apollinaire's first collection of poetry, L'enchanteur pourrissant, appeared in 1909, and his reputation was established in 1913 with Alcools, a melange of classical versification and modern imagery. Apollinaire had a reputation as a thief - he was detained for a week in 1911 on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa - and decided to become a French national by enlisting in the infantry during World War I.
He was stationed on the front in Champagne until 1916, when he suffered a head wound and had to be trepanned. He outlined his poetic and political beliefs in L'esprit nouveau et les poëtes in 1917. In 1918, after a series of short-lived affairs, he married Jacqueline Kolb. Apollinaire died of influenza during the epidemic, on November 9, 1918, in Paris. Calligrammes, a collection of concrete poetry, was published a few months after his death.
Apollinaire was an important part of several avant-garde movements in French literature and art at the start of the twentieth century. His influences include the Symbolist poets of the former generation: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. His book Peintres cubistes (1913) expounded on the theory behind cubism and analysed the work of important cubists. His play La mamelles de Tirésias, which was made into an opera by Franics Poulenc in 1947, is one of the earliest examples of Surrealism. His work was often concerned with the clash between the modern and the traditional, and it often juxtaposes drastically different stylistic elements, like gritty modern imagery in traditional forms and wildy varying tones and registers, to great effect.
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