Laforgue is the most original and technically accomplished member of the so-called ‘Decadent’ school of poets whose thinking is characterized by a superior disenchantment and a perverse artificial refinement. Baudelaire's influence on this ‘Decadent’ mood can be clearly felt. It inherits from him the cult of the dandy who elegantly sets himself against the grain of nature as a semblance of moral salvation; the taste for ambiguous sensual pleasures, spiced with eccentric imaginings; the mortal malady of ennui which condemns the poet to a self-exhausting neurasthenia and would happily destroy the world in a yawn.

At the root of Laforgue's sensitivity are a crisis of faith and an utter disgust with the vulgarity and futility of the created world: its tawdry cycles of love and procreation giving no relief from the mediocre and the bestial and leading nowhere but to death (the poet himself was tubercular and died at the age of twenty-seven). Life he sees as governed by a blind, impersonal Unconscious, in which human will is a useless foreign body. All that there remains for it to do, therefore, is to annihilate itself and be diluted back into the infallible but irrational universal indifference. It is this conversion to a religion of Nothingness which gives Laforgue's work its bleak cosmic colouring: the belief that all in the world is illusion; the impotent aspiration to Nirvana. This ‘pessimiste mystique’ is caught between ‘la mort de la terre’, rolling to its death in infinite space like a blind eye-ball, and what he calls ‘la céleste éternullité’.