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August 26, 1880



This famous French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, died young of war wounds, in 1918. He was born on August 26, 1880. Apollinaire helped create the avant garde; the term surrealism, is a coinage of his. Roger Shattuck translated his writing and put out a volume of selections of his writing for the English, and here we find this stanza:


I want in my own home:

A wife of sound reason
A cat among the books
Friends in every season
Without which I cannot live.


Myself I like the lack of punctuation in this poetry, as much as the wonderful list.

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