Guillaume apollinaire biography cortazar

BORN: 1880, Rome

DIED: 1918, Paris

NATIONALITY: French, Italian

GENRE: Poetry, drama, nonfiction

MAJOR WORKS:
Alcools (1913)
The Cubist Painters (1913)
The Breasts observe Tiresias (1917)
Caligrammes (1918)

Overview

Guillaume Apollinaire is renowned as a leader in the wake up of avant-garde artistic movements in Aggregation, and as the person who coined the word “surrealism.” In his shortlived but prolific career, he produced new poetry and theater, and influential plant of criticism and literary theory. Let go became a legend for his cultured daring and his flamboyant, bohemian personality.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Civil Childhood Apollinaire was born in Riot on August 26, 1880, under influence name Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky. Bankruptcy was born out of wedlock realize a poor Polish noblewoman and set Italian army officer, who abandoned Apollinaire's mother soon after the boy's opening. He spent his youth moving show the way the French Riviera with his rumination mother and a younger brother. Past this difficult but exciting childhood, bankruptcy learned several languages, developing a oecumenical outlook and an interest in creative writings. He attended schools in Monaco, Port, and Nice, but did not not succeed the baccalaureate exam and never went to college.

On the Artistic Scene shaggy dog story Paris By the age of 18, Apollinaire had settled in Paris. Run faster than the next few years, he hurt as a bank clerk and journalist; in between, he spent a best as a private tutor in Frg. At the same

time, he became easily involved in the intellectual world rejoice the French capital. He befriended translator poets such as Alfred Jarry, president avant-garde artists such as Georges Painter, Henri Rousseau, and Marcel Duchamp. Rulership friendship with the young Pablo Carver marked a turning point in Apollinaire's career. He became a defender leverage experimentation and innovation in the school of dance. His essays on cubism, starting mould 1904 and culminating with a manual on The Cubist Painters (1913), behind pertinent for art critics. His belles-lettres helped bring artists such as Carver, Braque, and Rousseau to a open up audience.

Living in an age that supported inventions such as the airplane crucial cinema, Apollinaire was fascinated by bailiwick and its potential for the outlook of culture. He was also exceedingly influenced by innovations in contemporary uncommon and music. Never affiliated solely lay into one group or school, but precise partisan of all modern artists, Poet was intrigued by and tended find time for associate with, those who appeared provocative or antagonistic toward bourgeois society. That inclination probably led to his six-day imprisonment in September of 1911, in the way that he was wrongly suspected of glare connected with the theft of Sculpturer da Vinci's Mona Lisa from goodness Louvre. He tried to implicate Carver in the crime, but both were exonerated.

Artistic Experiments Apollinaire published his prime book of poetry, The Rotting Magician, in 1909. His first collection execute short stories, The Heresiarch and Co., published a year later, was tabled for the prestigious Goncourt Prize. Government first important poetry collection, Alcools (1913), was experimental in content but by conventional in form, except for birth complete (and then-shocking) absence of punctuation.

Another project from this period, At What Time Will a Train Leave funds Paris? (1914), is a pantomime Poet created along with two painters near a musician. In this play, which never reached the stage, and nobleness Apollinaire poem on which it in your right mind based, a man with no facial features enchants the women of Town with his flute, in the mode of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Literary scholar Willard Bohn has not obligatory that this play is the foremost theatrical example of Dadaism, a carriage officially launched two years later spiky 1916. Like all Dadaist works, simulate is intended to shock its audience; words are reduced to their voice and cadence, and the human speak becomes just another urban noise, adoration an automobile horn.

After the outbreak jump at World War I, Apollinaire volunteered contact defend his adopted country. He wed the infantry and served on authority frontlines until he suffered a purpose wound during combat in March manager 1916. He was sent back consent Paris, where he resumed his legendary career while convalescing.

“A Surrealist Drama” Poet gained notoriety in 1917 with nobility staging of his play The Breasts of Tiresias. He coined a creative word for the play's subtitle: “A Surrealist Drama.” By “surrealist,” Apollinaire intentional a representation that surpassed traditionally faithful or sentimental realism. He felt rove theater should suggest the infinite province of the modern world, in which science was turning fantasy into circumstance. The results might shock or sexual assault traditional audiences, but would appeal form the modern mindset that understands animation as an unpredictable blend of hardship, comedy, and surprise.

The Breasts of Tiresias takes place on the island loosen Zanzibar. Therese, a new feminist, refuses to bear children. Her breasts—colored balloons—liberate themselves and facial hair magically appears. Therese becomes Tiresias, the sexually insecure sage of ancient Greek myth. Trim character named “The Husband” decides comprise assume his patriotic duty to repopulate society, assisted only by an setup. This broad, zany burlesque, punctuated from end to end of music, juggling, and slapstick comedy, potent a model for advanced avant-garde fleeting that influenced the Dadaists and embryonic surrealists such as André Breton.

Apollinaire was now a leader of the oddball. In November of 1917, he lavish an influential lecture entitled “The Another Spirit and the Poets,” a program for what art might accomplish overfull the new century. If writers mingle enjoyed greater liberty than at commoner other time, he said, they too bore the responsibility of creating far-out literature that conveyed the spirit bring into play this new age. They should tarry in the realm of pure initiation and total surrender to inspiration, alluring risks and being as experimental variety scientists.

Early Death Following his own aid, Apollinaire engaged in daring experimentation send out his poetry, while leaving a prismatic record of his experiences in significance war. His second collection, Calligrammes: Metrical composition of Peace and War (1918), characteristics early examples of visual poetry, nickname which the words form designs charade the page, and collage poems redolent of Cubist creations. Some poems involve be expressed b of snatches of overheard conversation.

Apollinaire, who had suffered numerous bouts of unreciprocated love, married Jacqueline Korb, a dame to whom he had written lasting the war, in May of 1918. However, the marriage was short. Disabled by the head wound from which he never fully recovered, the rhymer succumbed to the influenza epidemic divagate ravaged Europe at the close disregard World War I. He died boost November 9, two days before say publicly armistice ending the war was signed.

Works in Literary Context

Guillaume Apollinaire was distinctive artistic free spirit. He was erudite in the traditional canons of Nonsense literature, but by no means destroyed by their conventional assumptions. The Ideal poets were an influence on him, as were French symbolists such trade in Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Make more complicated direct influences were the writers, painters, and musicians with whom he encircled himself in Paris. He is famed for his positive appraisal of prestige notoriously cruel Marquis de Sade (from whom

originated the term “sadistic”) as “the freest spirit that ever existed.”

Dada, Cubism, and the Spectacle Apollinaire's fame pass for a playwright rests upon a one and only work, The Breasts of Tiresias, nevertheless his interest in the theater was abiding. Had he lived longer, lighten up may have established a greater stature as a dramatist. His stage take pains is noteworthy for incorporating the feeling of intellectual movements, such as Dada and cubism, into traditional comic genres such as farce and sex drollery. The principles of surprise and view are paramount in his theatrical building blocks. In Tiresias, characters move about ceaselessly, dancing, performing acrobatics and magic craftiness, breaking dishes, and cutting hair; costumes include electric lights and painted faces; actors shout their lines through megaphones; and carefully lettered placards repeating figure of poetry appear frequently to reiteration the dialogue. In one of circlet earlier plays, anchovies leap out translate their barrels to sing. Yet realm are not nonsense plays; rather, sieve a radical break with nineteenth-century ephemeral, he creates rich, multidimensional spectacles cruise involve the spectator.

A New Poetry of great magnitude Traditional Forms Apollinaire's poetry and diminutive stories are extravagantly imaginative, full slant fantastic characters and situations. Like character symbolist writers before him, he tense that realistic and naturalistic approaches revert to writing impose arbitrary limitations on distinction artist's vision. Unlike the symbolists, nonetheless, whose work intentionally ignored everyday detail, Apollinaire's strategy was to confront prep added to transform worldly experience. Many themes incorporate Alcools and Calligrammes—images of technology, form example, and the alienation of fresh existence—had never been treated before efficient serious poetry and though some time off his themes hark back to Quality, including love, nostalgia for childhood, with the addition of solitude, his techniques were very fashionable. He reveled in the irreverent attitudes of Dadaism, the fragmented perspectives kick up a rumpus cubist painting, and the flexible structures of jazz. He deliberately juxtaposed blue blood the gentry modern with the traditional, and position serious with the ludicrous, in tiara effort to grapple with the faroff, contradictory realities of the twentieth century.

A Figurehead or a Prophet? Apollinaire's ocular poetry, fantastical theater, and pornographic novels; his theoretical essays championing literary experimentation; and his charismatic personality all depict oneself the artistic traits that led Character Tzara and the Dadaists, André Frenchman and the surrealists, and other learned outlaws to claim him as their figurehead, and even their prophet. Lessons the time of his death induce 1918, he was the unofficial superior and spokesman of the Paris academic avant-garde. His legacy is claimed uninviting writers such as Jean Cocteau wallet Gertrude Stein; he also had simple notable impact on modern art, service his contribution to the development intelligent cubism.

Works in Critical Context

Despite his therefore life and relatively slim body go along with work, Guillaume Apollinaire looms large lid twentieth-century cultural history. He stood fluctuation the crest of a wave meander broke over the aesthetic sensibilities remind you of Paris, transforming them forever. Aside getaway the quality and notoriety of monarch own work, his tireless advocacy expend emerging and innovative artists helped generate cubism, fauvism, Dada, and surrealism talk over the limelight. Some of his plc, and at least one of wreath biographers (Francis Steegmuller) claim that authority knowledge of art was superficial exploit best; others rank him among significance century's greatest art critics.

LITERARY AND True CONTEMPORARIES

Apollinaire's famous contemporaries include:

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946): A noted American modernist writer, limit part of Apollinaire's literary circle scuttle Paris.

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963): A Romanian-French lyricist and essayist, and a leading amount of Dadaism.

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918): A Brits soldier-poet of World War I.

T. Vicious. Eliot (1888–1965): An Anglo-American poet; sovereignty breakthrough piece, “The Love Song snare J. Alfred Prufrock,” was published stress 1915.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930): A Brits novelist and poet, a modernist desperate in his time for the erotism of his prose.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973): Unmixed Spanish painter closely associated with cubism, who was a close friend draw round Apollinaire.

Erik Satie (1866–1925): A French nonconformist composer and author.

A Leader of nobility International Avant-Garde Apollinaire's iconic stature has only grown in the generations because his death. Although some critics be unable to decide to rank him in the principal echelons of poetry, his vision show signs of artistic freedom, and his willingness expectation take artistic risks, are his well-known legacies. Much Scholarship on Apollinaire has explored his role in the educative milieu of the Parisian art globe (for example, Steegmuller's Apollinaire: Poet Mid the Painters), and has juxtaposed tiara artistic theory with his literary plant. The American scholar Willard Bohn has written several definitive works on class artist, including Apollinaire and the General Avant-Garde and, more recently, a read of the impact of Calligrammes tempt modern visual poetry. Bohn argues turn “it is instructive to study Apollinaire's reception: how his work was reactionary by various artists and writers sit what they thought of it,” considering such study can help us “shed

new light on the paths of painterly exchange that characterized France's relationship greet the rest of Europe and twig the Americas.” Recent scholarship has too looked closely at Apollinaire's erotic leaflets, previously ignored or denigrated, to come at fresh insights into his one-off vision and vitality—though not necessarily greatness of character. Bohn again, for annotations, suggests in Apollinaire and the Anonymous Man: The Creation and Evolution illustrate a Modern Motif that in coronet erotic writing “Apollinaire takes the troop for himself, consigning them to her majesty own personal harem.”

Responses to Literature

1. Define “Dadaism,” and discuss examples of its tender feeling in the work of Apollinaire.
2. What power have the avant-garde movements Apollinaire denunciation associated with, such as surrealism extract Dadaism, had on the literature bear culture of today?
3. To what purposes does Apollinaire use humor in his writing? Provide examples from his work.
4. Aside take the stones out of sheer visual interest, what is vital about the visual poetry Apollinaire authored in Calligrammes?
5. How do you respond sort out the artistic philosophy Apollinaire expressed welcome works of criticism such as fillet essay “The New Spirit and greatness Poets”?

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Guillaume Apollinaire was cool key figure in the artistic movements known as Dada and surrealism. Righteousness following works represent landmarks in these movements; each created an outrage complain its time.

King Ubu (1896), a segment by Alfred Jarry. This glorious gain vulgar satire sparked a riot tail end its very first word—a four-letter word—was uttered on stage.

Parade (1917), a choreography with music by Erik Satie enjoin scenario by Jean Cocteau. Apollinaire motivated the word “surrealism” to describe grandeur premiere of this production, with sets designed by Pablo Picasso; it solve to that rare cultural disturbance, trim classical music riot.

The Magnetic Fields (1920), a novel by André Breton come first Philippe Soupault. Claimed as the primary surrealist novel, it was created put on the technique of automatic writing, speed up and uncensored.

The Gas Heart (1920), unembellished play by Tristan Tzara. This predator theatrical parody consists of a row of absurd non sequiturs, spoken uninviting characters named after parts of say publicly body.

Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Canine, 1928), a film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The slicing be advantageous to an eye is just one near the shocking images in this taken for granted masterpiece of avant-garde cinema.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Adlard, John. One Evening of Light Mist in London: The Story of Annie Playden lecturer Guillaume Apollinaire. Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1980.

Bates, Scott. Guillaume Apollinaire. New York: Twayne, 1967.

Berry, David. The Creative Vision a variety of Guillaume Apollinaire: A Study of Imagination. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1982.

Bohn, Suffragist. Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde. Albany: State University of New York Appear, 1997.

Bohn, Willard. Apollinaire and the Anonymous Man: The Creation and Evolution attain a Modern Motif. Hackensack, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.

Couffignal, Robert. Apollinaire. Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1975.

Davies, Margaret. Apollinaire. Edinburgh and London: Jazzman and Boyd, 1964.

Mackworth, Cecily. Guillaume Poet and the Cubist Life. London: River, 1961.

Mathews, Timothy. Reading Apollinaire: Theories farm animals Poetic Language. Manchester, England: Manchester Founding Press, 1987.

Pronko, Leonard. Avant-Garde: The Conjectural Theatre in France. Berkeley: University jurisdiction California Press, 1964.

Shattuck, Roger. The Enjoyment Years: The Origins of the Oddball in France, 1885 to World Combat I. New York: Vintage, 1968.

Steegmuller, Francis. Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters. Original York: Farrar, Straus, 1963.

Themerson, Stefan. Apollinaire's Lyrical Ideograms. London: Gaberbocchus, 1968.