Literature · Film · Military · 1880–1918
Born: 26 August 1880 · Died: 9 November 1918 · Age at death: 38
Guillaume Apollinaire died aged 38. He was born on 26 August 1880 and died on 9 November 1918.
French poet of Alcools and Calligrammes who championed Picasso and Cubism and coined the word surrealism
Did you know?He was once arrested and questioned by police as a suspect in the famous theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.
Guillaume Apollinaire was the poet at the centre of the Paris avant-garde. He was born in Rome to a Polish mother and grew up in Monaco. In Paris he befriended Picasso, Braque and Henri Rousseau and championed Cubism. In 1911 he was briefly jailed as a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa. He was innocent. His collection Alcools dropped punctuation. Calligrammes arranged words into pictures. He was wounded in the head in the First World War and died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
Guillaume Apollinaire ( ə-POL-in-AIR, French:; born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a Polish-French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish, Swiss and Italian descent.
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Profile
French poet, 1880–1918
Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome on 26 August 1880.
He published Alcools in 1913.
He coined the word surrealism in 1917.
He died in Paris on 9 November 1918, aged 38.
Career highlights
Did you know?He died two days before the armistice that ended the First World War.
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