Abstract

Five days before his twenty-first birthday, Guillaume Apollinaire set out on an automobile trip that would in large part determine his future. Together with the Viscountess Elinor de Milhau, who had hired him to tutor her daughter in French, he left for Germany on August 21, 1901. Since the car averaged thirty kilometers an hour, it took them nine days to reach her villa on the Rhine, near Honnef. For the next year, Apollinaire tutored the daughter in the morning and explored the picturesque area in the afternoon. Inspired by his new surroundings, he read voraciously and began to write a new kind of verse influenced by French Symbolism and German Romanticism. Apollinaire managed to combine a realistic form of lyric..