SOURCE: "The World Is My Idea," in Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 42-58.

In the following excerpt, Ramsey—a leading Laforgue scholar—explores how the different philosophers then popular with Paris intellectuals shaped Laforgue's poetry. In particular, he traces Laforgue's familiarity with and use of the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann.

There are two kinds of influence, as André Gide remarked: that felt by an individual and that undergone by a group. The influence of Schopenhauer in France during the 'seventies and 'eighties was of the second sort. This philosopher's subjective idealism, his belief that investigation of the external world could not lead to truth were readily seconded because they were intimately related to fundamental nineteenth-century attitudes. The Romantics had been nothing if not self-centered, even though a second stage in the work of many a poet—and pessimistic philosopher...