All Keyboards are Legitimate

All Keyboards are Legitimate is an anthology featuring an incredible cast of contemporary poets responding to the work of 19th century French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-87).

Laforgue, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, moved to Tarbes in the Pyrenees at the age of 6, later living in Paris and Berlin, where he was reader to the German Empress Augusta. He learned English by reading Shakespeare with the governess Leah Lee, who he married in December 1886 in St Barnabas Church, London – the same church where T. S. Eliot would marry Valerie Fletcher. Known as one of the innovators of vers libre, Laforgue published alongside Rimbaud, translated Walt Whitman, and published several key poetry collections: Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), and the posthumous free verse collection Derniers vers (1890). He died of tuberculosis in 1887.

All Keyboards are Legitimate is edited and introduced by Suzannah V. Evans.