Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918), whose real name was Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary de Wąż-Kostrowicki, is considered as one of the most important poets and lyricists of the early 20th century. The French writer with Italian-Polish roots is among the great and influential avant-gardists and innovators of poetry. He grew up in Rome and lived in Paris and Germany from the age of 20, where he began to write. His masterpiece is considered to be the anthology Alcools, which he published in 1913.
In connection with his ballet play Parade and the drama Les Mamelles de Tirésias, he himself used the term "surrealist," which is considered the first use of this attribution of characteristics for an artistic work. Later, André Breton elaborated and concretized the concept of surrealism in a manifesto and, together with Apollinaire and other writers, formed the group of surrealist literati.
Apollinaire had been active as an art critic in the Parisian avant-garde since 1905, and in the process also coined the term Orphism in his work Méditations to describe abstractionist tendencies in painting.
Apollinaire worked a lot from intuition, with spontaneity and feeling, using nature as a source of inspiration and the basis of his moment-based art. With his "Calligrammes," he also preempted visual poetry by noting poems in a form in which they also functioned as images.
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