Guillaume Apollinaire
Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
20th-century French literature
Guillaume Apollinaire radicalized the Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his "Calligrammes", a form of visual poetry. Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry, Max Jacob (a key member of the group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve (a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud (a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen (friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue (who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé and was close to Valéry and Larbaud).