Les complaintes, the first volume published by Jules Laforgue during his brief life, expressed immediately and firmly a poetic personality with which succeeding generations would have to deal. The poems in the Complaintes are so very different from those of Le Sanglot de la Terre that one would think at first that they were the work of another poet. But the change is not so extraordinary as it seems; it is merely a shift in tone. The poet treats the same major themes but in a minor key, the macrocosm is reduced to microcosm: the instrument is smaller, but capable nevertheless of vibrant echoes. The pale, serious young organist in the loft is replaced by the nimble, playful, sentimental organ-grinder on the street corner. The cosmic is dealt with in terms of the ordinary and everyday. When the volume was virtually complete, Laforgue wrote to his sister that he had given up his ideal of philosophical poetry: "I find it stupid to speak in a booming voice and adopt a platform manner. Today when I am more sceptical and don't get so easily carried away and moreover control my language in more minute clown-like fashion, I write little whimsical poems with only one aim in view: to be original at any cost." Lofty poetic diction gives way to popular speech; no subject is either too grand or too trivial to be treated. The romantic dirges of the early unpublished volume are replaced by complaintes, popular laments patterned after ballads of the sort people had sung for centuries. The words of the two titles are significant—sanglot and complainte—for they suggest the fact that Laforgue thought of the earth as a living and suffering thing:

O terre, ô terre, ô race humaine,
Vous me faites bien de la peine.

The lines are said in mockery, but they are meant.

Here is the Laforgue we have come to know. Here more than anywhere else in his work the poet has put down the world of the quartier, the hotel room, the café, the gas-lit street with all the people who frequent it. He has recorded for all time the twilit atmosphere of the suburbs with the little girl playing the piano somewhere in the distance, the sadness of Sunday. One could list the titles of hundreds of books, plays, and songs that go right back to this Parisian universe that Laforgue made his own. Here are the "one-night cheap hotels" and "sawdust restaurants" that caught the imagination of T. S. Eliot and have continued to fascinate his readers:

The whole of "Prufrock" is there.

No one has been more successful than Laforgue in bringing the machinery, the shabby and sordid décor of modern life into poetry, right down to the "marbre banal du lavabo." One feels that he was compelled to make poetry out of everything, omitting, as Arthur Symons pointed out, no hour of the day or night. He does not always succeed, of course, but the attempt is impressive. Everything animate or inanimate, has its rhythm and its song, clocks and foetuses, pine trees and bells, wind and stars, space and time. He attempts throughout to record a world that is living, moving, breathing, ticking, grinding. In "Complainte des débats mélancoliques et littéraires" he writes

Deux frictions de vie courante
T'auront bien vite exorcisé.

It is the sounds of vie courante, "running life," like running water, that he catches in the rhythms of popular songs, nursery tunes, old refrains. The instrument, the reed-pipe, on which the poet plays these melodies is the "chalumeau de ses nerfs"; and Laforgue uses the word calamus of Walt Whitman, whom he admired and translated.

Laforgue stated that the reader of the Complaintes would be absolutely overcome by a glance at the table of contents; the list of titles is indeed staggering. Among them are: Complaint of the Voices under the Buddhistic Fig Tree, Complaint of pianos heard in the suburbs, Complaint of a certain Sunday, Complaint of another Sunday, Complaint of the poet's foetus, Complaint of difficult puberties, Complaint of the moon in the provinces, Complaint of the incurable angel, Complaint of prehistoric nostalgias, Complaint of the blackballed, Complaint of the wind that is bored at night, Complaint of the tall pines around an abandoned villa, Complaint of time and her lady friend, space, Complaint on the Complaints, Complaint-Epitaph. One of the most amusing and typical of the poems is the "Complaint of the Poor Knight Errant," which begins with the Knight Errant asking:

Jupes des quinze ans, aurores de femmes,
Qui veut, enfin, des palais de mon âme?

But the young ladies will have none of the "palaces of his soul" and the pilgrimage of the poor knight concludes thus:

The Knight-Errant is reduced to base reality: he is the man between the sandwich-boards wandering up and down the sidewalk, and the "palaces of the soul" are the rooms at The Knight-Errant, the hotel-restaurant he advertises. Laforgue's genius is verbal, everything exists on the surface, but always for the sake of what lies below it. Here we have the inner man, the introvert, buttressed against the external world, but held and contained within it: the man who is literally a sandwich.

The Complaintes is the record of many voices seeking to become one. In the "Complainte propitiatoire à l'inconscient," which opens the volume after the "Préludes autobiographiques," Laforgue addresses the Unconscious:

Que votre inconsciente Volonté
Soit faite dans l'Eternité!

And he means what he says. The Unconscious is what the poet saw as "the law of the world, which is the great melodic voice resulting from the symphony of the consciousness of races and individuals." Laforgue gives to Hartmann's metaphysical concept a psychological and imaginative extension. Poetry for him was no longer the romantic outpourings of the individual, as it had been in his early poems, but rather the expression of the many individuals that go to make up the one. The strength of the Complaintes lies in Laforgue's realization of the complex nature of the subconscious mind. Although he affected the air of a dilettante, he was a psychologist in poetry long before the advent of modern psychology. The discoveries of Freud and Jung, which lie behind so much of the writing of the twentieth century, owe a great deal to Hartmann. Laforgue's interest in the Unconscious and his interpretation of it prepared the way, in a very real sense, for Eliot and Joyce.

Behind all the rhythms of these poems there is one fundamental, immediate rhythm which Laforgue strives to set down: it is the human heart-beat. This is made clear in what was probably the first complainte that he composed, the "Chanson du petit hypertrophique:"

The poet is too close to his subject for this to be a successful poem, but it strikes the keynote of the work. The reader hears in the lines—in the dropping of the mute e's and the linking of the vowels with the z sound as would popular street-singers—exactly what the boy hears, the thumping heart and the voice of the mother calling from beyond the grave. Death is always somewhere between the lines of the poems, and accounts for their effect of urgency, their hurried manner, their staccato beat.

The idea of writing complaintes came to Laforgue, he tells us, during the carnival which followed the dedication of the Lion de Belfort in the Place Denfert-Rochereau on 20 September 1880. In November 1882 he had composed only five complaintes; by August 1883 he had written forty (ten were to be added later). He began immediately to look for a publisher, and finally agreed to pay Léon Vanier, who had published Verlaine's poems, to bring out the book. Vanier was so long, however, in getting around to it that the work did not appear until July 1885, by which time the author had already embarked on other important projects.

What impressed, surprised, and confounded Laforgue's contemporaries was not only his innovations in rhythms and rhyme, but the freedom of his vocabulary, his appropriation of popular speech and his invention of words. He introduced words from every branch of human activity, mixing them together as if they naturally belonged side by side and came as readily to the tongue as the simplest child's phrase. Terms from philosophy, biology, medicine, phrases from aesthetics, sentimental song titles, words from billboards and advertisements all mingle in such a fashion that one has the impression at times that the poems are collages made up from the pages of a daily newspaper. Not content with giving existing words new meanings, the poet invents new ones whenever it serves his purpose. He combines two words of very different sense which bear some orthographical resemblance; he makes nouns of adjectives and adjectives of nouns:

which might be translated:

Much of the punning and verbal invention is, of course, quite untranslatable into English: "cloches exilescentes des dies iraemissibles," "s'in-Pan-filtrer," "sangsuelles," "crucifiger." Nor does it always go so well in French; far from it. Marcel Raymond remarks that the "marriages biscornus" of some of these verbal associations have the appearance of laboratory products. Laforgue himself was later to realize that he had overdone these extravagances, and yet, in his campaign against the cliché and the hackneyed phrase, he was trying for, and at times achieved, a kind of verbal freedom that had not existed in France since Rabelais.

English, because of its double Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots, lends itself more readily than French to verbal dislocation and invention. And if we cannot translate many of the phrases of Laforgue, we can point to a contemporary English parallel. It exists where one would least expect to find it—in the nonsense poems and prose of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. It is doubtful that Jules Laforgue ever read Lear, but as an admirer of Kate Greenaway and Caldecott, he would certainly have approved of Lear's drawings for children; and he would surely have delighted in such words as "runcible," "plumdomphious," "sponge-taneously," and "scroobious." Lear and Laforgue, in their different ways, were revolting against the poetic eloquence of their day, an eloquence of which at the same time they had great appreciation. Laforgue admired the poems of Hugo, Lear wept on hearing the lyrics of Tennyson. Like Lear, Laforgue was unique in poetry, and like him he was an innovator: they both sang "warbling songs with a silvery voice and in a minor key." Laforgue is perhaps elsewhere more poignant and moving, but with this book he gave modern poetry, French and English, a new direction and a new life.