Guillaume Apollinaire

Born in Rome on August 26, 1880, under the florid and almost romantic name of Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky, the man French literature knows as Guillaume Apollinaire carried within him, from the very beginning, something of a character from a novel. A son of cosmopolitan Europe, he chose France as his adopted home, and the French language as his true fatherland - a homeland he would ceaselessly strive to conquer, until finally obtaining his naturalization in 1916, in the heart of the war in which he had enlisted. That this adoption was also an act of love is evident throughout his entire body of work: he loved the French language with the particular fervor of those who have chosen it.

Very early on, Apollinaire threw himself into literary life with an energy that would never leave him. In November 1903, he launched the monthly publication Le Festin d'Ésope, a founding gesture by a man who was not content merely to write: he wanted to gather people, spark conversations, and circulate ideas. He possessed a crossroads temperament, a being made for encounters. In 1907, he crossed paths with the painter Marie Laurencin, with whom he would share a chaotic relationship for seven years - seven years of passion, breakups, and reconciliations that would fuel his poetry with a burning sentimental intensity. In La Chanson du mal-aimé, one hears the voice of a man who experienced love as an open wound, and who managed to transform it into a song.

His poetic work is of the kind that changes the landscape. Alcools brings together poems that oscillate between the purest melancholy and the most disconcerting formal audacity. Zone opens the collection like a manifesto of modernity, blending the urban everyday with lyrical momentum, the Eiffel Tower with childhood memories, the streetcar with the sacred. Le Pont Mirabeau, with its haunting musicality and a refrain that returns like water under the arch, has become one of those rare poems one carries within oneself without even remembering having learned it. Here, Apollinaire touches upon something universal: the passage of time, love fading away, and we who remain on the bank.

But Apollinaire is not merely a poet of emotion: he is an inventor. He coined the term calligram to designate those poems written in the shape of drawings, where the meaning and the silhouette of the text merge - rain falling in slanted lines, a dove taking the form of its own words. In 1917, he also forged the word surrealism, which he used to describe his drama The Breasts of Tiresias, a joyfully provocative and unclassifiable play. The word would outlast him, of course, and become the name of one of the most powerful movements of the century. Apollinaire had thus named what he foresaw without yet being able to see it fully come to pass. Close to Cubism and Orphism, he stood at the exact intersection where poetry and the visual arts cross-fertilized one another, in that early twentieth-century Paris where everything seemed possible.

He died in Paris on November 9, 1918, swept away by the Spanish flu, two days before the Armistice. He was thirty-eight years old. Due to his service during the war, he was declared mort pour la France - the ultimate recognition from a country he had adopted and which, at last, fully recognized him as its own. There is something dizzying about his passing, at the exact threshold between war and peace, as if Apollinaire belonged entirely to that bygone world that was collapsing. And yet, nothing in his work smacks of the end: everything within it is momentum, beginning, promise. He opened doors that others stepped through after him, and his poems continue to resonate with that singular freshness of things that have never grown old.

Bibliography

• Zone
• The Song of the Ill-Beloved
• Mirabeau Bridge
• The Breasts of Tiresias1917
• AlcoolsExplored

In the library

• AlcoolsPublished on Wednesday, 19 August 2026