Meet French Poet and Critic Guillaume Apollinaire

Apollinaire was born in or near Rome in 1880. He was the son of Angelika Kostrowicka, a Polish noblewoman, and possibly Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont, a Swiss-Italian officer and aristocrat. After a nomadic and independent childhood with his brother, Albert, he settled in Paris in the early 1900s. He was in low spirits following the end of a love affair. But it was not long before the energy of the capital, Europe’s centre of creative innovation, pulled him up.

These relationships were formative for his own writing and thought. Although he was never a painter, Apollinaire became a prominent champion of cubism, surrealism and futurism. For the plastic arts and poetry alike, he embraced the new ideas circulating in Paris’s cafés and studios: the rejection of verisimilitude and linear time as standards to uphold, and crucial for Apollinaire, the use of surprise. Surprise, he said, was “le plus grand ressort nouveau”— the greatest new motivating force. Harnessing this force did not mean doing away with tradition entirely, but rather creating a new order that would serve contemporary life. In Apollinaire’s work, subject matter, vocabulary, punctuation, poetic form, rhyme and imagery would all be re-examined and deployed to create this vital element of surprise.

A brief excerpt from “La chanson du mal-aimé” (“The Song of the Poorly-Loved”) from his major collection Alcools (1913; translated 1964 by Robert Shattuck) will give an initial impression of Apollinaire’s work. In later posts, look for a deeper discussion of his poetry, including more selections from Alcools and works he wrote while serving in the French army during WWI.