Laforgue was only twenty-seven years old when he died, August 20, 1887. In this possibly poorly translated stanza, Jules Laforgue speaks of cats:
Oh my beautiful cold-fearing cat, when gloomy autumn
Makes the kids in courtyards yelp louder
How many did we spend of these spleeny days
Dreaming face to face in my well closed room
Here is some information from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Jules Laforgue, ....[the] French Symbolist poet, [was] master of lyrical irony and one of the inventors of vers libre (“free verse”). The impact of his work was felt by several 20th-century American poets, including T.S. Eliot....
.... Through the writer Paul Bourget he became secretary to Charles Ephrussi, an art collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who introduced him to Impressionist painting. In November 1881 he was appointed reader to the Empress Augusta in Berlin and remained in Germany for almost five years, during which time he wrote most of his works. He married an English woman, Leah Lee, in London on Dec. 31, 1886, and they returned to Paris, where, poverty-stricken, Laforgue died of tuberculosis the following year.
.... He was attracted by Buddhism and by German philosophy, especially by Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Edward von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious. Inspired by the example of Tristan Corbière and Arthur Rimbaud, he forged new words, experimented with common speech, and combined popular songs and music-hall tags with philosophic and scientific terms to create an imagery that appears surprisingly modern. His search for new rhythms culminated in the vers libre that he and his friend Gustave Kahn invented almost simultaneously.....
Cats, then, were not the only bond Eliot shared with the symboliste poets.
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