SOURCE: "Jules Laforgue," in Forty Immortals, Joseph Lawren, 1926, pp. 159-62.

In the following essay, De Casseres records his impressions of Laforgue as an artist.

Jules Laforgue, Frenchman, who died at twenty-seven, left three volumes—a book of poems, a book of legendary moralities and a book of epigrams and meditations.

Three great poets of modern times have left for us in their work mirrors of the beauty that is ghastly—Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue. The beauty of the ghastly—whence comes it? In the poems of Laforgue one is in the midst of death and in the midst of life at once. The ghastly, the cynical, the Ideal and Absolute make up the monstrous arabesque of his nature. Moored to the wharf of the flesh, the sails of his spirit strain with breezes from the Open. What Open? The Cimmerian Open of the N...