August 16, 1860

Jules Laforgue,  (August 16, 1860 to  August 20, 1887,) was a French poet, one of the first writers to use  free verse. He is perhaps mainly remembered today for influencing T. S. Eliot. Eliot said that he learned from the symbolist poets,  that "the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources of the unpoetical." He meant Baudelaire, and Laforgue taught him that. In fact, does one not hear in Laforgue's characterization of Baudelaire as " Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist," a model for Eliot's self description decades later (1927)  as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." But, the ripples are the same. Eliot never quite got that unexplored resources thing.