Laforgue is one of the inventors of French free verse. In the first part of this article I present a few hypotheses regarding the conditions that favor the production and reception of this new form; in support of my argument I focus on the counter-example of Marie Kryzinska. The second part of the article analyzes the inventive thrust within poetic discourse, described by Laforgue as a “forgetting” of all extant (poetic and social) practices. Laforgue coins this term in his letters to Gustave Kahn. In order to emphasize the potential that this new form has to “remake verse” he completely rewrites some poems from Les Fleurs de bonne volonté. The form that he actually adopts, and which is very simple, is closer to modernist poetry than it is to the free verse as defined theoretically by Gustave Kahn. The latter is thus not able to recognize it as verse at all. Laforgue’s premature death only adds to this literary divergence, thus failing to find his due place within the tradition of free verse.