Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexander Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky

Today is the birthday of French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880) (books by this author), born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexander Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky in Rome, Italy, to a former Italian military officer and a Polish noblewoman. Apollinaire's mother brought him up on the French Riviera, where he spent considerable time in gambling halls and once pretended to be a Russian Prince.

At 20, he moved to Paris, where he taught, worked in an office, and fell in with a group of upstart, bohemian artists and writers like Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and Georges Braque. He loved the poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé and began writing his own. One of his earliest poems, "Song of the Poorly Beloved," sprang from a failed romance with an Englishwoman. Apollinaire was quite famous for his "ideogram" poetry, in which the text was both a picture and a poem. He used typography to shape the poem like the object described: a heart, a bird, a clock, the Eiffel Tower.

Apollinaire was dedicated to challenging the bourgeoisie. He even declared that the Louvre should be burnt down. He started a literary magazine, Les Soirées de Paris (1914), and wrote a book, The Cubist Painters (1913), extolling the virtues of Picasso and Braque. He could be a petty thief, too, and was once accused of stealing the famous painting Mona Lisa. He was arrested and jailed and pleaded with Picasso to speak up for him, but Picasso was frightened, too, and kept mum. Apollinaire was released after six days and the charges dropped. The culprit was an Italian housepainter who tried to sell the painting two years later.

Apollinaire is credited with coining the term "Surrealism," about which he said, "We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness."

His play The Breasts of Tiresias was performed in Paris in 1917. On opening night, the audience had to wait two hours for the play to begin, forced to stare at the blue stage curtain. The queen of Paris literary life, Madame Rachilde, called out, "Enough of that blue!" The curtain parted and a woman appeared. She undid her blouse, revealing two gigantic, gas-filled balloons, which she ripped off and threw into the audience.
Apollinaire was determined to become a French national. He did so by volunteering to fight in World War I, where he sustained a serious head injury that left him temporarily paralyzed. He died of the Spanish flu in 1918.
Writer's Almanac