SOURCE: "Jules Laforgue's Symbolist Language: Stylistic Anarchy and Aesthetic Coherence," in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, November, 1976, pp. 1-11.

In the following essay, King examines Laforgue's attempt to make a new language for poetic expression.

Of the three principal poetic "movements" of nineteenth-century French literature romanticism, parnassianism and symbolism—the last was the most revolutionary in its exploration of the possibilities of language. Whereas romanticism inaugurated a new poetic sensibility, symbolism produced a new form of poetic expression. Though Mallarmé is most identified with the symbolist revolution, other poets, and most notably Laforgue, exemplified the contradictory and multi-directional nature of a venture which created a language alternating between acceptance and rejection of traditional norms, and between a language of transparent communication and anarchic obscurity.

No contemporary critic of symbolist writing in general, and Laforgue in particular, whether sympathetic or hostile, was able to ignore the problem presented by...