Terme de Glossaire

A French poet – whose real name is Wilhelm Apollinaris Albertus de Kostrowitzky – who was born in Rome and died in Paris. The son of an exiled Polish aristocrat mother and an Italian officer who did not acknowledge him. After somewhat chaotic years of school study in Monaco, Cannes and Nice, he travelled across Europe in his youth: Stavelot in the Belgian Ardennes, Rhineland, Austro-Hungary and finally London. Voyages which would remain for him, and in particular as a result of the romances that went hand in hand with them, a precious source of poetic inspiration. Having returned to Paris he published his first texts in literary journals such as La Revue blanche and La Plume, regularly met up with a group of poets amongst whom were Alfred Jarry, André Salmon, Paul Fort and Max Jacob, struck up friendships with painters of the first rank, amongst whom Pablo Picasso stood out, not to mention his in many respects decisive encounter with the artist Marie Laurencin. It was in this Montmartre bohemia that he took part in all the avant-garde movements in aesthetics, whilst also stimulating them as no-one else did. His works bear witness to a person who, from his L'Enchanteur pourrissant (1909) and L'Hérésiarque et Cie (1910) up to Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), decisively opened the door to Modernism: free verse, the abolition of punctuation, the use of blank spaces, a cascade of images, out of the ordinary associations, typographical representations of the objects invoked; all these procedures, which largely evoke Cubism, express the New Spirit of which Apollinaire was the pioneer and which he defined as a means of ‘exalting life’ in all its forms. And yet this innovator was also a continuer of tradition, if only for the Romantic echoes in his poems, elegiac when he feels ‘starved of love,’ lyrical when he declares his love for Lou during the war. Because this poet, an occasional art critic, enrolled in the artillery in 1914; but who, having suffered a head injury due to shrapnel in 1916, died two days before the Armistice, struck down by the Spanish Flu.