Work hard, poets, work with good cheer:

Work leads to wealth and freedom from fear;

And butterflies, for all their graces,

Are merely caterpillars who persevere.

--Guillaume Apollinaire, Caterpillar (Selected Poems/Everyman,  with an introduction by Robert Chandler)

Apollinaire: A romantic, a lover of grace and beauty who was unable to stomach the naturalism of Maupassant or Zola. The first important champion of Cubism (avant-garde art movement / Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque…)

`The Pretty Redhead’, written not long before Apollinaire’s death, is both a love song and a poetic testament. The simplicity of the last lines is especially touching: ‘But laugh laugh at me / Men everywhere especially people here / For there are so many things I’m afraid to tell you / So many things you’d never let me tell you / Have pity on me.’ Like ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, this poem reveals a vulnerability which is part of what makes Apollinaire so very approachable, more so than any other major French poet of the past century, says Robert Chandler.