Guillaume Apollinaire

(1880 - 1918)

Born to a Polish mother and an Italian father in Rome in 1880, Guillaume Apollinaire published his first essays on art in 1905, and his first book of poems, The Bestiary, in 1911. He enlisted in the French army in 1914, rose to the rank of second lieutenant, and received a head wound in 1916. Apollinaire coined the term surrealist in the preface to his play The Breasts of Tiresias in 1917. He died the following year during the influenza pandemic.