SOURCE: "Dernier vers, " in Jules Laforgue, The Athlone Press, 1977, pp. 57-74.

In the following essay, Collie studies the stylistic and thematic aspects of Laforgue's Dernier vers.

Derniers Vers

Having published the boldly inventive volume Les Complaintes in 1885 and the modish L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune in 1886, Laforgue remarkably went on, the next year, to fashion for himself an entirely new type of poem which appeared posthumously as Derniers Vers. Laforgue was the first poet to write free-verse in France. By this it is not meant that he was literally the first person to write unmetrical poems with lines of varying lengths, but that he was the first poet to do so successfully. The Derniers Vers can be seen either as a natural part of Laforgue's development, as the poems to which his experimental writing of the years in Germany was naturally leading, or they can be seen as...