When Laforgue publishes his Laments in 1885, the lament is an outdated form. This editorial gesture may seem paradoxical for an author who intended to be original at all costs. But in fact Laforgue is after a different target than just imitating an obsolete artistic form. He uses the lament, a typical popular genre, as theoretical and poetical model to reconsider the value of the notion of the "popular", which thus appears as the very condition of the modern, manifested in the poem by means of a different phrasing that does not rely on the metrical line, nor on free verse.
Jules Laforgue; modernity; poetics; politics