SOURCE: "French Stories for Pound and Eliot," in The New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1985, p. 10.

In the following review, Sieburth comments on the influence of Laforgue's Moral Tales on English-speaking Modernist authors.

Jules Laforgue's special allure for British and American modernists is often compared to the mystique of Edgar Allan Poe among the French Symbolist poets. If many English-speaking readers remain puzzled by the spell Poe cast over the intelligence of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, so the French tend to be equally perplexed by the cult status accorded Laforgue by such talents as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Crane and Stevens. Although his work and influence have been the subject of important studies in English, Laforgue has long been dismissed in his native land as a relatively minor fin de siécle figure, worth only a passing mention in standard literary histories. The announcement of a forthcoming Pl...