Selected Poems (Penguin Classics S.) - Softcover

LaForgue, Jules

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014043626X ISBN 13: 9780140436266

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998

Synopsis

Deeply pessimistic yet full of yearning, tender yet savagely self-mocking, Laforgue has a unique voice and vision which nonetheless mark him out as one of the founding fathers of modernism. Like Baudelaire before him, he was determined to face up tothe ugly and decadent as well as the conventionally poetic aspects of himself and the world about him. His greatest achievement, the posthumous 'Derniers Vers' (1890), was the first complete French volume of free verse. The brilliance of his imageryknows no limits either of propriety or of reason, and the verbal inventiveness is breathtaking. Laforgue expands the technique of poetry almost explosively, for every register of French is used, from the highest to the lowest.

About this title

About the Author:

Jules Laforgue (1860-87) was a great and original French poet, one of the creators of modernism. He moved to Paris in 1876 where he led a poor and solitary life before taking a post at the court of Empress Augusta of Germany. He died of tuberculosisin 1887, a year before his wife.
Graham Dunstan Martin teaches in the French Department at the University of Edinburgh.

Synopsis:

A new bilingual selection, with plain prose translations at the foot of the page, of one of the most attractive and original of all French poets, who was also one of the founders of European Modernism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 014043626X
• ISBN 13: 9780140436266
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352