Jules Laforgue Critical Essay | Anne Holmes

Anne Holmes

SOURCE: "Towards the Derniers Vers: 'Trouver une langue'," in Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 95-120.

In the following excerpt, Holmes examines some of the elements that moved Laforgue toward free verse. She considers the influence of Impressionist aesthetics and looks at how Laforgue's poetic prose in Moralités légendaires allowed him to experiment more boldly in Derniers Vers.

The Derniers Vers was the first volume in French to be composed entirely in free verse, and it owes some of its fame to this fact. The poems were not published as a volume until after Laforgue's death, but eleven of the twelve appeared during his lifetime, ten in pairs in Kahn's La Vogue, and one in Téodor de Wyzewa's Revue indépendante.... In free verse he was a leader, but he was nevertheless influenced by a number of factors that determined the particular direction he followed....
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