VALÉRY, PAUL. — French writer and poet, born in Sète on 30 October 1871, died in Paris on 20 July 1945.
He lived almost constantly in Paris and, when young, was a disciple and friend of Mallarmé. After publishing several poems of Symbolist character, he devoted 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, renounced all poetic and literary activity for twenty years. In reality, this silence was not fruitless, since in the meantime the poet, who had devoted himself to the mathematical sciences, would bring their logical rigor into a field dominated, like poetry, by imagination, feeling, and irrationality. His renewed encounter with poetry took place in 1917 and produced a poem entitled La jeune Parque, in which V.’s inner drama is symbolically transposed: he is always intent on reducing the obscurities of the spirit to clarity. It is the image of an intellectual consciousness 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 published in 1922 under the title Charmes (particularly noteworthy is the lyric Le cimetière marin, in which the poet, beginning with meditation on death, reaches and plunges, exultantly, into the ocean of the universe and eternity). V.’s aesthetic ideas can be 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), 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. V.’s final work, Mon Faust, published posthumously, perhaps evokes better than any other the figure of this solitary and supremely refined poet of the intellect.