You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you From entering a church and confessing this morning You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines ("Zone")

Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic for Matin Intransigeant and Paris Journal. His maternal grandfather was a general in the Russian Imperial Army killed in the Crimean War. In an open-handed preface to the catalogue of the Brussels Indépendants show Apollinaire stated that these 'new painters' accepted the name of Cubists which has been given to them.

Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: ​[ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet playwright short story writer novelist and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917 used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.