Guillaume Apollinaire, poet, journalist, critic, editor, short-story writer, pornographer, dramatist, stockbroker, and bank clerk, achieved fame among his contemporaries primarily in his role of impresario, leading critic, and spokesman for avant-garde action in the arts. More enduringly, he has come to be recognized as a major artist in his own right, especially in his guise as a protean and syncretistic poet. The now-conventional casting of Apollinaire in the role of a Janus in whom a nineteenth-century Romantic sensibility and the modernist disposition to ambiguity, technical artifice, and experimentation met has assured him a niche among the dominant shapers of twentieth-century French literary culture. Perhaps understandably, though, the canonization of an Apollinaire "dieu bifrons" (double-faced god) simultaneously committed to the values of conservation and newness has not laid to rest the question of the degree of originality or inventiveness achieved in his poetry.

Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky was born...