Jules Laforgue
born Aug.
16, 1860, Montevideo, Uruguay
died Aug. 20, 1887, Paris
French Symbolist poet, a master of lyrical
irony and one of the inventors of vers libre
(“free verse”). The impact of his work was
felt by several 20th-century American poets,
including T.S. Eliot, and he also influenced
the work of the Surrealists. His critical
essays, though somewhat neglected, are also
notable.
Laforgue was brought up by relatives at
Tarbes, Fr., from 1866 to 1876, when he
joined his family in Paris. After finishing
his schooling at the Lycée Fontanes, he
attended the lectures of the literary critic
and historian Hippolyte Taine at the École
des Beaux-Arts. Through the writer Paul
Bourget he became secretary to Charles
Ephrussi, an art collector and editor of the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who introduced him
to Impressionist painting. In November 1881
he was appointed reader to the Empress
Augusta in Berlin and remained in Germany
for almost five years, during which time he
wrote most of his works. He married an
English woman, Leah Lee, in London on Dec.
31, 1886, and they returned to Paris, where,
poverty-stricken, Laforgue died of
tuberculosis the following year.
In the
verse of Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation
de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “The Imitation
of Our Lady the Moon”), and Le Concile
féerique (1886; “The Fairy Council”),
Laforgue gave ironical expression to his
obsession with death, his loneliness, and
his boredom with daily routine. He was
attracted by Buddhism and by German
philosophy, especially by Arthur
Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Edward von
Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious.
Inspired by the example of Tristan Corbière
and Arthur Rimbaud, he forged new words,
experimented with common speech, and
combined popular songs and music-hall tags
with philosophic and scientific terms to
create an imagery that appears surprisingly
modern. His search for new rhythms
culminated in the vers libre that he and his
friend Gustave Kahn invented almost
simultaneously. He reinterpreted William
Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Gustave
Flaubert, and Stéphane Mallarmé in a
collection of short stories, Moralités
légendaires (1887; Six Moral Tales From
Jules Laforgue). His art criticism,
published in the Symbolist reviews and
subsequently in Mélanges posthumes (1923),
testifies to his remarkable understanding of
the Impressionist vision.
