The fruit of the chance encounter of a wandering musician and a curvy cyclist, the charismatic Kronjamandal is raised in the countryside and after many adventures moves to Paris to become – what else? – a great poet. He surrenders to the world of imagination, creates, falls in love, is disappointed and triumphs, but often what you have not calculated happens exactly what you have not calculated…
Beyond cheeky tribute to poetry itself, at a time when it no longer needs it, The Murdered Poet by Guillaume Apollinaire is mainly what its author says: a timeless, playful, unpredictably poetic, irreparably subversive and incurably scintillating surrealist myth.
THE CREATOR
A reference point for the French avant-garde of the early 20th century, the exuberant Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) –born in Italy, of an unknown father and a progressive-minded aristocratic Polish mother– wrote poems, novels, plays, and criticism that paved the way for the surrealist movement (he himself introduced the term, as well as that of cubism, in his study "Cubist Painters" in 1913).
He had already been arrested, along with Picasso, for the theft of the Mona Lisa (!) in 1911 and spent a few days in prison. During World War I, Apollinaire enlisted in the French army, and The Murdered Poet was written in 1916 in a hospital bed where he was recovering from a head injury.
In 1917 he published the artistic manifesto L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes and the following year he died of Spanish flu.
