SOURCE: "Some Notes on T. S. Eliot and Jules Laforgue," in Essays in French Literature, Vol. 2, November, 1965, pp. 103-14.

In the following essay, Stormon charts the apparent echoes of Laforgue in Eliot's verse. The critic sees an affinity between the two poets based mainly on Laforgue's "reaching after some vital hidden centre, " which Stormon equates with Eliot's objective correlative.

In December 1908, Eliot, then aged twenty, discovered Arthur Symons' book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, in the Library of the Harvard Union, and found himself excited by the quotations in it, particularly those from Laforgue. Shortly afterwards, he went to Schoenhof s foreign bookshop in Boston, and had the good fortune to light on the three volumes of the 1901-1903 edition of the Œuvres complètes de Jules Laforgue (Mercure de France). In Laforgue's verse he found a form of expression which helped him to say the kind of...