“Our Mad Poetics To Confute” Laforgue and the Personal Voice

Abstract

Abstract Eight years before he encountered Hulme in London, Eliot discovered the young French poet who was the first to draw his developing sensibility into play-Jules Laforgue. In December 1908, during his junior year at Harvard, Eliot became intrigued by Arthur Symons’s quotations from Laforgue in The Symbolist Movement in Literature; he went directly to Schoenhof’s and ordered the twovolume Oeuvres Complete de Jules L(!finiue (4th ed., Paris: Mercure de France, 1909). When his copies arrived, he signed them “Thomas Eliot 1909.” A year earlier he had picked up the poems of Baudelaire, and though Baudelaire’s images of the city had a “great impact” on him, he found Baudelaire too overwhelming at the time and put him down. In Laforgue, however, Eliot experienced a shock of recognition: here was a poet with a seemingly similar temperament, a poet experiencing similar difficulties and desires, a poet whose voice was more intimate and less intimidating than Baudelaire’s. Laforgue showed him how poetry could make much more use “of contemporary ideas and feelings, of the emotional quality of contemporary ideas, than one had supposed.” Eliot immersed himself in the study of Laforgue and later declared that he was “the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech” (TCC 126). For the next two years Eliot filled his notebook with poems written mostly in the manner of Laforgue. At some point he tipped in an undated leaf, evidently intended as an epigraph page, on which he had inscribed a four-line invocation: