Looking for a safe place in a world ravaged by wars, the Polish teenager Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary de Wąż-Kostrowicki (you get a cookie if you pronounce it right) was roaming around Europe until he finally settled in Paris in the early 20th century. Little did he know that more misery was yet to come.

The charming French capital was the cradle of art back then, seducing thousands of artists to live, create, and in most cases – die there. That was the fate of Wilhelm, who became Guillaume Apollinaire, today considered as one of the greatest French poets of Polish origin. 

Why Guillaume Apollinaire Matters

The father of the terms Cubism (the art movement that inspired Picasso) and Surrealism started a new literary revolution in the early 1900s. His collection of calligrams opens a new chapter in the history of poetry where words become images. The calligram is a visual representation of poetry. In Apollinaire’s work, the arrangement of the words plays an important role in the meaning of the poem. 

All of these poems were published in 1918, the same year when the war-weakened Apollinaire died at the age of 38 during the Spanish flu pandemic. Leaving an unkind world, the poet kindly reminded us of the power of artistic creation as a path to absolute freedom. 

Guillaume Apollinaire wasn’t just a poet. He had a noble mission. He needed to reinvent a world where destruction replaced creation, war removed art and terror closed the last doors of hope. Apollinaire gave shape to words, reinventing a world where we can dream, create, construct and reconstruct. A world where art has the last word.