Oeuvre de guillaume apollinaire biography
Guillaume Apollinaire: A Brief Biography
Guillaume Apollinaire stands as a pivotal figure in the history of French literature. His innovative approach to poetry and contribution to the development of modernist literature cement his place among the greats. This section explores Apollinaire's life from his early years to his profound influence on French literature.
Early Years and Guillaume Apollinaire Biography
Guillaume Apollinaire, born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome in 1880, was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic. With a Polish mother and an Italian-born, but unidentified father, Apollinaire's upbringing was as cosmopolitan as his later works would reflect. He moved to France during his adolescence and quickly immersed himself in the country's vibrant literary and artistic culture.
Apollinaire's birth name reflects his mixed European heritage, which deeply influenced his later works.
Throughout his early years in Paris, Apollinaire became a well-known figure in the bohemian circles, forging strong relationships with contemporary artists and writers. His work encapsulated the dynamism of early 20th-century Paris, and he became a vocal advocate for avant-garde movements, including Cubism and Surrealism.
Achievements and Influence on French Literature
Apollinaire's contributions to French literature can be broadly categorised into his literary output and his role as a cultural commentator and critic. He pioneered the use of free verse in French poetry, experimented with calligrammes (poems in which the layout and typography form a visual image), and was instrumental in the development of Surrealism, even though he died before the movement was formally established.
Calligrammes: Poems where the text is arranged in such a way that it forms a visual image, relating to the content of the poem.
One of Apollinaire's most famous calligrammes is Il pleut (It's raining), where th The poet, playwright, writer, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire was a pivotal figure of the avant-garde in France, connecting artistic and literary circles in Paris especially during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He coined the term “cubism” in his preface to the catalogue for the 8th salon of the cercle d’art “Les Indépendants” in Brussels in 1911, and was one of the first critics to define the principles of Cubism in his essay Les peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters, 1913). He collected the works of Georges Braque, André Derain, Marie Laurencin and Pablo Picasso—the artists that figured most prominently within his “aesthetic meditations” on the “new spirit” of the age—and introduced readers to Cubist works reproduced in his review, Les soirées de Paris (1912–14). Born in Rome to a Polish mother and an Italian father, Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki moved to Paris at the age of twenty. Between 1902, when he began to write for La Revue Blanche, and 1918, the year of his untimely death from the Spanish flu, Apollinaire was the foremost critic of his age, reviewing art, literature, theater, and ballet as a contributor to leading journals and newspapers Le Matin, Paris Journal, and Intransigeant. In addition to publishing erotic novels, fiction, and poetry, he edited several avant-garde literary journals, in which he championed the work of artists and writers within his inner circle, including Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Laurencin (with whom he had a five-year affair), Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. In 1912 Apollinaire co-founded the review Les soirées de Paris with writers André Billy, René Dalize, and André Salmon funded in part by the aristocratic patron Comte Étienne de Beaumont. In 1913 he published Les peintres cubistes, comprising a selection of his criticism published between 1905 and 1912, and Alcools, his first major collection of poetry, with Picasso’s Guillaume Apollinaire is one of the most widely read and influential of modern French poets. He was born either in Rome, where he was baptized, or in Monaco, where he was educated at the Lycee Saint-Charles. Quintessentially modern, his reputation rests principally on two volumes of poems-Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), which broke with the traditions of nineteenth-century poetry in both form and content. Apollinaire introduced free verse, eliminated punctuation, and even wrote poems in the form of pictures to express the dynamism of the new twentieth century. Apollinaire wrote novels, short stories, and plays as well as poetry. He wrote The Cubist Painters (1913), which first defined the nature of cubism. In addition, he edited for the Bibliotheque des Curieux erotic books of repute and helped to catalogue the repository of forbidden books in the Bibliotheque Nationale. He became the friend of great cubists, including Picasso and Braque. He died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. .Guillaume Apollinaire
Rome, 1880−Paris, 1918
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