Jules Laforgue Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue, poet, critic and parodist, holds a unique place in the history of French literature as one of Charles Baudelaire's most astute and self-conscious inheritors, whose ironic and self-mocking poetic stance at once reflected and shaped the modernist aesthetic. Credited with introducing vers libre (free verse) into French poetry, Laforgue is known both for his stylistic innovations and for his efforts to expand the topoi of his genre, incorporating the aggressively quotidian and the relentlessly erudite into his poems, which reflect the Decadent themes of isolation, pessimism, and the search for originality through the filters of contemporary science, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology. Although Laforgue's influence during his lifetime was somewhat limited--because of his early death at age twenty-seven--his posthumous fame grew steadily in the twentieth century; he has been embraced by authors as diverse as Alain-Fournier, the Dadaists, and, most notably, T. S. Eliot, who incorporated aspects of Laforgue's formal and thematic invention into "The Love Song of J.

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