Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters

by Francis Steegmuller

Portrays the life and literary career of Guillaume Apollinaire and discusses his friendships with artists including Picasso and Braque

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Francis Steegmuller was an American biographer, translator and fiction writer, who was known chiefly as a Gustave Flaubert scholar.

Reviews

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly fascinating book, a little opaque to those like me not well-versed in French history and letters (there are a lot of proper nouns, figures and place-names, and untranslated French passages). The appendices including Apollinaire’s “New Spirit and The Poets,” a quasi-manifesto whose new spirit still resounds today, were brilliant additions.

It’s looking like a whole large-scale project is in order, of reading about WWI, Dada, surrealism (a word Apollinaire coined after being trepanned for a head-wound in battle), including a need for me to read good biographies of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau.

I would write more about this remarkable reading experience but I have to tap a kidney like a racehorse.

[Julia Hendrickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A handy basic biography, good for context and anecdotal stories (especially making connections between artists and writers in 1900-1914 Paris) but the research is a little lacking in concrete references and thus somewhat suspect. The narrative is broken up roughly chronologically, tracing Apollinaire's childhood, his move to Paris and interactions with Picasso/ Max Jacob, the Mona Lisa scandal of 1911, and his time as a soldier 1915-16.