SOURCE: "Self-mockery: Laforgue," in Stages of Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Valéry & Mallarmé, Ohio University Press, 1990, pp. 51-91.

In the following excerpt, Howe undertakes a stylistic analysis of Laforgue 's poetry that focuses on its dramatic qualities.

i) From unicity to multiplicity

 Quand j'organise une descente en Moi,
J'en conviens, je trouve là, attablée,
Une société un peu bien mêlée,
Et que je n'ai point vue à mes octrois. 

Such is the experience of the speaker of Laforgue's poem "Ballade." "JE est un autre," Rimbaud had written some fifteen years earlier, in the context of his critical remarks about Romantic poetry; Laforgue shares this sense of the "otherness" of the self, insisting indeed on the presence of a multiplicity of "others." According to Warren Ramsey, Laforgue had learned from the philosopher Hartmann "to think of the human individual as an aggregate, a sum...