French · 1880–1918
French poet and art critic who named Cubism and Surrealism, championed Picasso, and reinvented the poem on the page. Born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky in Rome to a Polish mother, he moved to Paris and became the impresario of the avant-garde. Alcools (1913) stripped punctuation from verse; Calligrammes turned poems into pictures. He volunteered for World War I, took shrapnel to the head, survived surgery, then died of Spanish flu two days before the Armistice. His influence radiates outward: concrete poetry, visual art, the manifesto as form. Every poem that plays with space on the page owes him something.