Volume 29, Number 9 · May 27, 1982

Fun in the Waste Land

By Michael Wood
Looking for Laforgue: An Informal Biography
by David Arkell

Persea Books, 248 pp., $20.00

There were 'deeps in him,' Ezra Pound said of Jules Laforgue; 'and Laforgue more than they thought in him.' Eliot, characteristically, was more cautious in his praise, anxious not to mix Laforgue with the major poets, but generous and constant all the same. He saw him as 'an admired elder brother,' 'the first to teach me how to speak': 'Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language.' When Eliot wants to place Marvell, he adapts Laforgue: 'C'était une belle âme, comme on ne fait plus à Londres.' ('He had a fine soul, of the kind they no longer make in London.')



Review, 1860 words

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