Jules Laforgue

The work of the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) is distinguished by its qualities of skepticism and irony and its development of the technique of free verse.

Jules Laforgue was born on August 16, 1860, at Montevideo, Uruguay, one of five children of an emigrant French family. Returning to France in 1866, he went to school at Tarbes in southwest France until the family moved to Paris in 1876. Unsuccessful in the baccalauréat (university entrance) examination in 1878, he began to write but led a solitary life with few friends and no regular employment. In 1881 he was appointed French reader to the empress Augusta of Germany and spent almost 5 years moving round imperial residences in Germany with the court - a well-paid life with plenty of leisure, but rigid, boring, and isolated from the literary world of Paris.

Laforgue's natural pessimism, which was reinforced by his solitary life and by his study of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, underlies all his poetry. It is especially obvious in a kind of cosmic despair, linked to a rather facile irony, in his first collection of verse, Le Sanglot de la terre, abandoned in 1882 and published posthumously. He then turned to the Complaintes de la vie (1885), a series of poems using the rhythms, verse pattern, and colloquial language of the complaintes, the popular songs of Paris, coining striking images and even new words against a persistent background of irony. They were followed at the beginning of 1886 by another book of poems, L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, in which linguistic innovations are less prominent and the symbol of the pierrot, or clown, sad behind his comic mask, represents the poet's own melancholy.

In September 1886 Laforgue resigned his post and married an English woman, Leah Lee, on December 31, returning to Paris in the hope of continuing his literary career there. But he had contracted tuberculosis, and after months of illness and poverty he died on Aug. 20, 1887. In 1890 his last poems, Derniers vers, probably written in 1886, came out; in these Laforgue reaches full maturity. The somewhat dilettante and decadent young dandy has now given way to a truly creative poet, using free verse and great variation of rhythm and imagery to express a haunting melancholy, as if he knows of his imminent death.

Further Reading

Translations of some of Laforgue's works, with an introduction by the author, are in Jay Smith, Selected Writings (1956). A short book on the poet is Michael Collie, LaForgue (1963). An earlier full-length study is Warren Ramsey, Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance (1953). Ramsey, in Jules Laforgue (1969), also edited a series of essays on the poet by various authors.

Additional Sources

Arkell, David, Looking for Laforgue: an informal biography, New York: Persea Books, 1979.

Arkell, David, Looking for Laforgue: an informal biography, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1979.

Collie, Michael, Jules Laforgue, London: Athlone Press, 1977.

Laforgue, Jules (1860-87). A great and original French poet, one of the creators of modernism, always detested by the French for his facetiousness. The question is: can one be a great poet if one continually sends up the most solemn things, including language itself? Influenced by Walt Whitman, he was in turn a major influence on T. S. Eliot. Born in Montevideo, the son of a French teacher, he was educated in Tarbes in the Pyrenees and in 1876 came to Paris, where he led a poor and solitary life. He took a post of reader at the court of Empress Augusta of Germany (1880). A stormy affair occurred with an unidentified ‘R’. In 1886 he married an English girl, Leah Lee, who died of tuberculosis in 1888, as he had the previous year. His Derniers vers were published in 1890; earlier volumes include Les Complaintes (1885) and L'Imitation de Notre Dame de la lune (1886). Had Laforgue foreseen his life, it would not have surprised him, for his mentors were Schopenhauer and E. von Hartmann, and he took the universe to be an irony practised against its inhabitants.

After some early verse of Hugolian portentousness, he adopts a playfully provocative stance, daring the reader to glimpse the true Laforgue through a series of violently shifting masks, attitudes, tones of voice, and registers. One attitude is no sooner struck than it is debunked by the next one. These procedures are embarrassed and defensive, and Woman seems to be in league with the jeering universe. But it is also true that he declares his true self to be unknown to its owner. His persona is the pierrot, a mournful, absurd, yet pitiable clown. He expands the techniques of poetry almost explosively, for every register of French is used, from the highest to the lowest, every emotional attitude is touched upon, the attitude of the poet flickers like a turning crystal, the brilliance of his imagery knows no limits either of propriety or of reason, and the verbal inventiveness is breathtaking. Scrupulous attention is paid to the emergence of shifting moods from the unconscious (Hartmann's pre-Freudian collective unconscious). The prose pieces of Moralités légendaires (1887) spread these procedures much more thinly and, though funny, are so in a dishearteningly facetious way. His masterpiece, Derniers vers, combines these techniques with a moving seriousness, in which pity and despair render life more meaningful and acceptable.

[Graham Dunstan Martin]

Bibliography

• W. Ramsey, Laforgue (1953)
• D. Arkell, Looking for Laforgue (1979)

Jules Laforgue

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Jules Laforgue (French pronunciation: [ʒyl laˈfɔʀɡ]) (Montevideo, 16 August 1860 – Paris, 20 August 1887) was an innovative French poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist". ^[1]

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 External links 4 References

Life

His parents, Charles-Benoît Laforgue and Pauline Lacollay, met in Uruguay where his father worked first as a teacher and then a bank employee. Jules was the second of eleven children in the family, the eldest child being Jules' brother Émile, who was to become a sculptor of note. In 1866 the family moved back to France, to Tarbes, his father's hometown, but in 1867 Jules' father and mother chose to return to Uruguay, taking along their 9 younger children, leaving Jules and his older brother Émile in Tarbes to be raised with a cousin's family.

In 1876 Jules's father took the family to Paris. In 1877, his mother died of pneumonia, three months after a miscarriage, and Jules, never a good student, failed his baccalaureate exams. He failed again in 1878, and then a third time, but on his own began to read the great French authors and visit the museums of Paris.

In 1879 his father became sick and returned to Tarbes, but Jules stayed behind in Paris. He published his first poem in Toulouse. By the end of the year, he had published several poems and was noticed by well-known authors. In 1880 he moved in the literary circles of the capital and became a protégé of Paul Bourget, the editor of the review La Vie moderne.

Much happened to Laforgue in 1881: he attended a course of Taine's lectures and developed a great interest in painting and art. Charles Ephrussi, a rich collector, one of the first collectors of Impressionist art, took Laforgue on as his secretary. The direct influence of Impressionism on Laforgue's early development as a poet is a topic in Laforgue studies. In his introduction to his edition of Les Complaintes, Michael Collie, author of a biography of Laforgue (Laforgue (1963)), states that he sees a more or less conscious attempt on Laforgue's part to produce a literary equivalent of Impressionism. In 1881, Laforgue wrote a novel, Stephane Vassiliew and prepared a collection of poems entitled The Tears of the Earth, which he later abandoned, though some pieces were altered for Les Complaintes. Also in 1881, his sister left him alone in Paris to tend to their father who was seriously ill in Tarbes. When his father died, Laforgue did not attend his father's funeral.

From November 1881 until 1886, he lived in Berlin, working as the French reader for the Empress Augusta, a sort of cultural counselor. He was well paid and could pursue his interests very freely. In 1885, he wrote L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, widely regarded as his masterpiece^{[citation needed]}.

In 1886, he returned to France and married Leah Lee, an Englishwoman. He died the next year of tuberculosis, his wife following him shortly thereafter.

Influenced by Walt Whitman, Laforgue was one of the first French poets to write in free verse. Philosophically, he was an ardent disciple of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. His poetry would be one of the major influences on the young T. S. Eliot (cf. Prufrock and other observations) and Ezra Pound. Louis Untermeyer wrote ^[2], "Prufrock, published in 1917, was immediately hailed as a new manner in English literature and belittled as an echo of Laforgue and the French symbolists to whom Eliot was indebted."

Works

• Stéphane Vassiliew (1881, not published until 1943)
• Les Complaintes (1885)
• L'Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886)
• Moralités légendaires (1887)
• Des Fleurs de bonne volonté (1890)
• Derniers vers (1890)
• Berlin, la cour et la ville (1922)

External links

• http://www.laforgue.org (in French)

References

• France, Peter (Ed.) (1995). The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-866125-8.

1. ^ Dale, Peter. Poems of Jules Laforgue. Anvil Press, 1986.
2. ^ Untermeyer, Louis. A Concise Treasury of Great Poems, Simon & Schuster, 1953. Only poems originally written in English included.

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