SOURCE: "A Record of Many Voices: The Complaintes of Jules Laforgue," in The Western Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring, 1956, pp. 219-27.

In the following essay, Smith comments on Les complaintes, Laforgue 's first published collection of poetry, highlighting the poet's innovative use of language in the work.

Les complaintes, the first volume published by Jules Laforgue during his brief life, expressed immediately and firmly a poetic personality with which succeeding generations would have to deal. The poems in the Complaintes are so very different from those of Le Sanglot de la Terre that one would think at first that they were the work of another poet. But the change is not so extraordinary as it seems; it is merely a shift in tone. The poet treats the same major themes but in a minor key, the macrocosm is reduced to microcosm: the instrument is smaller, but capable nevertheless of...