VALÉRY, PAUL. — French writer and poet, b. at Sète on 30 Oct. 1871, d. in Paris on 20 July 1945.
He lived almost always in Paris, and in his youth was a pupil and friend of Mallarmé. After publishing some poems in the Symbolist style, he turned to methodological studies (*Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci*, 1894), and in order to better understand the act of artistic creation and its relationship with the spirit, he renounced all poetic and literary activity for twenty years. In reality this silence was not unproductive, for in the meantime the poet, who had devoted himself to mathematical science, would bring the logical rigor of these disciplines into a field dominated, like poetry, by imagination, feeling, and irrationality. His new encounter with poetry occurred in 1917 and bore the title of a poem, *La jeune Parque*, in which the inner drama of V., ever intent on reducing the obscurities of the spirit to clarity, is symbolically transposed; it is the image of an intellectual conscience that, in the act of creation, divines the origin of every disturbance and subjects it to the laws of reason. Together with an *Album de vers anciens*, the new poems were collected and published in 1922 under the title *Charmes* (notably the lyric *Le cimetière marin*, in which the poet, starting from meditation on death, arrives and immerses himself, exulting, in the ocean of the universe and eternity). Valéry’s aesthetic ideas are to be found in the numerous volumes and pamphlets published between 1920 and 1940 (*Poésie et pensée abstraite*, *Discours sur l'esthétique*, *Analecta*, *Mémoires d'un poème*, *Littérature*, etc.), but they cannot be separated from his other theoretical writings and philosophical dialogues (*Monsieur Teste*, *Eupalinos*, *L'âme et la danse*), in which he introduces real and imaginary characters engaged in continual spiritual dialectic, with an extreme play of intelligence that makes him resemble certain classics of Greek literature. Valéry’s last work, *Mon Faust*, published posthumously, perhaps evokes better than any other the figure of this solitary and most refined poet of the intellect.