Guillaume Apollinaire

Born Kostrowicki in 1880, of Polish, Swiss, and Italian descent, Apollinaire grew up under the influence of Symbolist poetry but broke free early, refusing any single school. In 1911 he named Cubism; in 1912, Orphism; in 1917, Surrealism - a term he applied to Erik Satie's work and then to his own play The Breasts of Tiresias, one of the first Surrealist literary pieces and later the basis for Poulenc's 1947 opera. He wrote without punctuation, chased imagination over theory, and co-founded the magazine Les Soirées de Paris in 1912 while working as a journalist and art critic across Paris. Wounded in World War I, he died on 9 November 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic, recognized as "Fallen for France" - admired by Breton, Aragon, Soupault, the young poets who would carry what he had already sketched.