Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Guillaume Apollinaire
« Reply #1: 30.04.09 at 22:11 » |
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on 30.04.09 at 19:01, Anne H wrote:| In light of current news stories - was doing a bit of web surfing and noticed that the author of "La Cueillette" (the poem that inspired, or indeed virtually provided, the lyrics of "My Egoist") was a victim of the 1918 flu pandemic at the age of only 38 - this I hadn't known before. Very sad. |
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Even more sad when you consider how many others died as a result of that pandemic. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster, afffecting, as it did, an estimated 1 billion people. Estimates as to the numbers who died as a result vary wildly, but the most reliable suggest that the was somewhere between 20 and 40 million. There a few suggest that the number may be as high 100 million. It is said that roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties.
So Guillelmus (or Wilhelm) Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky's died in at time when a terrible virus was killing (too) many of his age.
Kevin Cryan
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