Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was born to French parents in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1860. Following the outbreak of war between Uruguay and Paraguay in 1866, he was sent to school in Tarbes in the southwest of France. Almost all of Laforgue's poetry was written while he was employed as French Reader to the Empress Augusta at the Imperial Court of Prussia from 1881-1886. During his lifetime he published only two volumes of poetry, Les Complaintes (1885) and L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886). In 1887 he...See more

Jules Laforgue was born to French parents in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1860. Following the outbreak of war between Uruguay and Paraguay in 1866, he was sent to school in Tarbes in the southwest of France. Almost all of Laforgue's poetry was written while he was employed as French Reader to the Empress Augusta at the Imperial Court of Prussia from 1881-1886. During his lifetime he published only two volumes of poetry, Les Complaintes (1885) and L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886). In 1887 he moved with his English wife, Leah Lee, to Paris, hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. Shortly after their arrival, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died in August of that year. Generally acknowledged as the inventor of vers libre or free verse, Laforgue has proved enormously influential on many writers, in particular on the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. See less