Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was the illegitimate son of a Polish mother whose name was Kostrowitzky. After desultory studies in Paris, he led a rather nomadic life until the First Great War in which he enlisted in 1914. He was wounded in 1916 and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Apollinaire has many moods and many styles. He can be simple and tender, coarse and vulgar, gay, ribald, intense. He is an experimenter in form and is known especially for his calligrams where the arrangement of the words on the page actually forms a design or picture. Apollinaire is very human and for that reason has a universal appeal.

• "Guillaume Apollinaire." Representative French Poetry. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. 106-09.
• Apollinaire, Guillaume. Alcools: Poèmes 1898-1913. Librairie Gallimard, 1920. Internet Archive