VALÉRY, PAUL. - French writer and poet, b. at Sète on 30 Oct. 1871, d. at Paris on 20 July 1945.
Having lived almost always in Paris, in his youth he was a disciple and friend of Mallarmé. After publishing some poems in the Symbolist taste, he applied himself to methodological studies (Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, 1894), and in order better to understand the act of artistic creation and its relations with the spirit he renounced all poetic and literary activity for twenty years. In reality this silence was not unfruitful, if in the meantime the poet, who had devoted himself to the mathematical sciences, was to bring their logical rigor into a field dominated, like poetry, by imagination, feeling and irrationality. The new encounter with poetry came in 1917 and bore the title of a poem, La jeune Parque, in which is symbolically transposed V.'s inner drama, ever intent on reducing the obscurities of the spirit to clarity; this is the image of an intellectual consciousness that in the act of creating divines the origin of every disturbance and subjects it to the laws of reason. Together with an Album de vers anciens the new poems gathered together saw the light in 1922 under the title Charmes (particularly noteworthy is the lyric Le cimetière marin, in which the poet, starting from the meditation of death, arrives and immerses himself, exalting, in the ocean of the universe and of eternity). V.'s aesthetic ideas are gathered from 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 other theoretical writings and philosophical dialogues (Monsieur Teste, Eupalinos, L'âme et la danse), where he introduces real and imaginary characters in continuous spiritual dialectic, with an extreme play of intelligence, which makes him resemble certain classics of Greek literature. V.'s last work, Mon Faust, published posthumously, evokes perhaps better than any other the figure of this solitary and most refined poet of the intellect.
Bibliography9 works
Giacinto Spagnoletti