Like Laforgue, Supervielle was born in Montevideo, close to the vast South American pampas, and, curiously, both are poets with an acute and highly imaginative sense of space. Both have the ability to see the earth in a cosmic perspective, gyrating among the planets, suffering vertigo and abandonment, and seeking some inkling of its purpose and justification. Coming to France from the outside (and in Supervielle's case making the slow journey across the Atlantic numerous times in the span of a few years), neither poet is imprisoned in a purely Parisian or local vision of things: Laforgue's French provincial scene is set against the corrective mirror of the moon and kept in proportion by comparison with the Missouri and the polar seas, while Supervielle's Boulevard Lannes suddenly finds itself transported lock, stock and barrel into the celestial realm, to tremble as it looks down through the chinks in its paving-stones to see the galloping stars below, and wonder in bewilderment if it should be switching its streetlamps on or off. It is perhaps their awareness of double roots and a kind of homelessness which prompts the theme of exile in their work, encouraging in Laforgue his easy ironic detachment from his own person, and in Supervielle a constant uncertainty as to the boundaries between l'espace du dedans and l'espace du dehors and a tendency to see himself projected from the outside.

But in other respects the poetic worlds of Laforgue and Supervielle are poles apart. Supervielle is a genial spirit, full of warmth and sympathy for his fellow-men and linked by a bond of solicitude and humour to all aspects of the created world, animals, rocks and plants.