Guillaume Apollinaire
Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
Guillaume Apollinaire
In 1900 he wrote his first novel "Mirely, ou le petit trou pas cher" (pornographic), which was eventually lost. Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was "L'enchanteur pourrissant" (1909), but "Alcools" (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay "Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques" on the Cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term "orphism" to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.