and promoting the newest movements in literature and painting: He campaigned for the Fauves, the Unanimists, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Georges Braque, and Alfred Jarry. He became the principal spokesman for cubism.

In 1911, Apollinaire had the harrowing experience of being imprisoned for five days on the strength of a false accusation that he had received and hidden objects stolen from the Louvre. He was desolated. Despite his acquittal, newspapers continued to attack him; his position as leader of the avant-garde was threatened as was his legal right to stay in France. Added to these worries was his lack of funds. His spirits revived with the invitation to become associate editor of a new review, Soirées de Paris. His first article advised the abandonment of “likeness” and of subject matter in painting. He could not be cowed.

In the summer of 1912, Apollinaire read a nearly finished version of “Zone” to the Spanish painter Francis Picabia, and his wife. This date is important because of the resemblance of “Zone” to Blaise Cendrars’s “Pâques à New York” (Easter in New York), published in 1912. Since Apollinaire regularly published Cendrars’s work in Les Soirées, the influence may well have been mutual.

Apollinaire had for some time wanted to marry the painter Marie Laurencin, but his mother opposed the marriage on the grounds of an insufficient dowry. The liaison lasted until the fall of 1912; the breakup inspired one of the poet’s best-known lyrics, “Le Pont Mirabeau” (“Mirabeau Bridge”). The climax of Apollinaire’s career came in 1913: His two most important volumes appeared, Alcools, translated into English in 1964, and Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, 1944). The complete lack of punctuation in Alcools, insisted upon by the author, profoundly shocked the public.

In the spring of 1914, Apollinaire was asked to write art reviews for the Paris-Journal. He wrote a review daily, with three exceptions, between May and the outbreak of war, including the first calligramme—a poem whose words form a design. He considered the calligramme his most important innovation.

When Apollinaire applied for French citizenship, he was refused. He fled to Nice, where he met the aristocratic madcap Louise Coligny-Châtillon (called “Lou”), with whom he fell in love. For a brief period he gave himself up to an orgy of opium smoking and general debauchery; then suddenly he left for Nîmes and joined the artillery. Lou followed, and, although their violent love affair soon ended, it inspired many of Apollinaire’s best poems in Calligrammes (1918; English translation, 1980).

In January, 1915, he wrote that he found the soldier’s life ideal for him. He left for the front on Easter Sunday. Even from the trenches, he continued his voluminous correspondence. He wrote letters and poems to Lou and to all of his old friends and to a new love, Madeleine Pagès, to whom he became engaged. Under fire in the front line, he printed on gelatin plates twenty-five copies of Case d’armons (1915; a bunker), a collection of verse and drawings.

In November, he was transferred to an infantry company in the Champagne offensive, where, despite real hardship, he wrote frequently to Pagès. On March 17, he was reading Mercure de France in a trench, when he found that his blood was dripping onto the paper. Shrapnel had wounded his head more seriously than he at first had realized; he was moved back to Paris, where he was trepanned on May 11. While in the hospital, Apollinaire put together some unpublished stories in a volume that he entitled Le Poète assassiné (The Poet Assassinated, 1923), which was published in 1916. At the end of this year, he renewed acquaintance with Jacquelin Kolb, a redhead whom he called Ruby, and moved back to his sixth-floor apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he found the domestic tranquillity that he had never before known.

Apollinaire’s friends organized a banquet on December 31, 1916, to welcome him home and to celebrate the publication of The Poet Assassinated. The ninety guests included practically all the famous writers and painters of the period. One of the guests, Pierre Reverdy, founded the following March the review Nord-Sud, in which Apollinaire’s contributions helped to open the way for Dada and Surrealism. In June, 1917, Apollinaire personally oversaw the production of his first play: Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1961). Its buffoonery and vulgarity excited immense interest.

With the continuing deterioration of Apollinaire’s health, he relied increasingly on Kolb; they were married quietly in May, 1918. She had inspired his only important poem since his release from the hospital, “La Jolie Rousse,” a summary of his attitude toward conventional and the new experimental poetry. He went on working despite depression and nagging health problems. Then, only two days before the Armistice, he died of Spanish influenza.

Summary

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Guillaume Apollinaire on the art and poetry of the twentieth century. Perhaps, as one of his biographers, Francis Steegmuller, claims and some of Apollinaire’s painter friends hinted, the poet had no real knowledge of art, or perhaps, as Professor Leroy Breunig and numerous artists and historians have proclaimed, he was one of the greatest art critics of the century. At any rate, his vigorous and ceaseless championship of the struggling innovators of his time led to the serious acceptance of Fauvism, cubism, primitive art, abstract art, and eventually Dada and Surrealism.

Apollinaire’s stories and his one play pale into insignificance by the side of his critical writings and poetry. In one article written shortly before his death, he explains that the new spirit consists largely of surprise and that poets should not abandon the traditional elements but should try to capture contemporary life. He foresaw a synthesis of the arts, aided by films and photography. In his autobiographical ars poetica, “La Jolie Rousse,” he does not advocate the overthrow of the old “Order” but advises the acceptance of “Adventure” and leads the way. Apollinaire’s numerous volumes of verse, especially Alcools and Calligrammes, place him among the masters of French lyric and elegiac poetry. His vision of poetic and artistic freedom is an enduring legacy.

Bibliography

Adéma, Marcel. Apollinaire. Translated by Denise Folliot. New York: Grove Press, 1955. This is the prime source of biographical material, the bible of scholars researching the poet and his epoch.

Bates, Scott. Guillaume Apollinaire. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This book offers detailed erudite analyses of Apollinaire’s major works and informed judgments on his place in French literature and in the development of art criticism. It emphasizes the importance to the entire world of Apollinaire’s vision of a cultural millennium propelled by science and democracy and implemented by poetry. Included are a chronology, a twenty-six-page glossary of references, notes, and selected bibliographies of both primary and secondary sources.

Couffignal, Robert. Apollinaire. Translated by Eda Mezer Levitine. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975. This is a searching analysis of some of Apollinaire’s best-known works, including “Zone,” strictly from the Roman Catholic point of view. It traces his attitude toward religion from his childhood to his death. The book contains a chronology, translations of ten texts, both poems and prose, with the author’s comments, a bibliographical note, and an index.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. In the two long chapters devoted to Apollinaire, “The Impresario of the Avant-garde” and “Painter-Poet,” the author gives a year-by-year and at times even a month-by-month account of his life, loves, friends, employment, writings, and speeches. The tone is judicial, the critical judgments fair and balanced. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Steegmuller, Francis. Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963. This is an exhaustive, extremely well-documented, unbiased, and highly readable biography. Contains a preface, translations, numerous photographs and illustrations, two appendices, notes, and an index.