Born: Cette (now Sete), France, 30 October 1871. Education: Educated at a school in Sete to 1884, and a lycee in Montpellier, 1884; University of Montpellier, licence in law 1892. Military Service: 1889-90. Family: Married Jeannie Gobillard in 1900, three children. Career: Worked for the War Office, 1897-99; private secretary to Edouard Lebey, director of the press association Agence Havas, Paris, 1900-22; editor, with Valery Larbaud and Leon-Paul Fargue, Commerce literary review, 1924-32; administrator, Centre Universitaire Mediterraneen, Nice, from 1933; held Chair of Poetics, College de France, Paris, 1937-45. Awards: Honorary Doctorate: Oxford University. Chevalier, 1923, Officer, 1926, and Commander, 1931, Legion d’honneur. Member: Academie frangaise. Died: 20 July 1945.
Publications
Collections
Collected Works, edited by Jackson Mathews. 15 vols., 1956-75.
Oeuvres, edited by Jean Hytier. 2 vols., 1957-60.
Verse (includes prose poems)
La Jeune Parque. 1917; edited by Octave Nadal, 1957.
Album de vers anciens 1890-1900. 1920.
Charmes; ou, Poemes. 1922.
Poesies. 1933, enlarged edition, 1942.
Paraboles. 1935.
Melange (includes prose). 1941.
L’Ange. 1946.
Agathe; ou, La Sainte du sommeil. 1956.
Paul Valery: An Anthology, edited and translated by James R. Lawler. 1977.
Plays
Amphion: Melodrame, music by Arthur Honegger (produced 1931). 1931.
Semiramis: Melodrame, music by Arthur Honegger (produced 1934). 1934.
Mon Faust (produced 1962). 1946.
Other
La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste. 1919, revised edition, as Monsieur Teste 1, 946; as An Evening with Mr. Teste, translated by Ronald Davis, 1925; also translated by Merton Gould, 1936; as Monsieur Teste, translated by Jackson Mathews, 1947.
Introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vinci. 1919; as Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by Thomas McGreevy, 1929.
Eupalinos; ou, L’Architecte; L’Ame et la danse. 1923; as Eupalinos; or, The Architect, translated by William McCausland, 1932; as Dance and the Soul, translated by Dorothy Bussy, 1951.
Fragments sur Mallarme. 1924.
Une conquete methodique. 1924.
Variete 1-5. 5 vols., 1924-44; first 2 vols., as Variety, translated by Malcolm Cowley and William Aspenwall Bradley, 1927-38.
Durtal. 1925.
Etudes et fragments sur le reve. 1925.
Le Retour de Hollande: Descartes et Rembrandt. 1926.
Petit Recueil de paroles de circonstance. 1926.
De la diction des vers. 1926.
Propos sur l’intelligence. 1926.
Analecta. 1926.
Rhumbs. 1926.
Quinze lettres a Pierre Lous (1916-17). 1926.
Autre Rhumbs. 1927.
Maitres et amis. 1927.
Quatre lettres sur Nietzsche. 1927.
Essai sur Stendhal. 1927.
Lettre a Madame C . . . 1928.
Poesie: Essais sur la poetique et le poete. 1928.
Variation sur une ”Pensee.” 1930.
Propos sur la poesie. 1930.
Cahiers B. 1930; as Notebooks, translated by Paul Gifford, 2001.
Litterature. 1930.
Oeuvres. 12 vols., 1931-50.
Discours de l’histoire. 1932.
Choses tues. 1932.
Moralites. 1932.
Discours en l’honneur de Goethe. 1932.
Calepin d’un poete: Essais sur la poetique et le poete. 1933.
L’Idee fixe. 1934.
Pieces sur l’ art. 1934.
Suite. 1934.
Hommage a Albert Thibaudet. 1936.
Villon et Verlaine. 1937.
L’Homme et la coquille. 1937; as Sea Shells, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1998.
Technique au service de la pensee. 1938.
Discours aux chirurgiens. 1938.
Introduction a la poetique. 1938.
Degas, Danse, Dessin. 1938; as Degas, Dance, Drawing, translated by Helen Burlin, 1948.
Existence du symbolisme. 1939.
Conferences. 1939. Tel quel. 2 vols., 1941-43.
Mauvaises pensees et autres. 1942.
Eupalinos ou l’architecte; L’Ame et la danse; Dialogue de l’arbre. 1944.
Au sujet de Nerval. 1944.
Regards sur le monde actuel et autre essais. 1945; as Reflections on the World Today, translated by Francis Scarfe, 1948. Henri Bergson. 1945.
Mon Faust: Ebauches. 1946.
Souvenirs poetiques. 1947.
Vues. 1948.
Ecrits divers sur Stephane Mallarme. 1950.
Histoires brisees. 1950.
Selected Writings, translated by Denis Devlin. 1950.
Lettres a quelques-uns. 1952.
Correspondance 1890-1942, with Andre Gide, edited by Robert Mallet. 1955; as Self-Portrait: The Gide/Valery Letters, translated by Jean Guicharnaud, 1966.
Correspondance 1887-1933, with Gustave Fourment, edited by Octave Nadal. 1957.
Cahiers. 29 vols., 1957-61.
Cahiers 1894-1914, edited by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Judith Robinson-Valery. 2 vols., 1989.
Translator, Les Bucoliques, by Virgil. 1953.
Critical Studies:
Valery by Theodora Bosanquet, 1935; Valery by Elizabeth Sewell, 1952; The Art of Valery by Francis Scarfe, 1954; The Universal Self: A Study of Paul Valery by Agnes Ethel Mackay, 1961; Valery by Henry Grubbs, 1968; Worlds Apart: Structural Parallels in the Poetry of Paul Valery, Saint-John Perse, Benjamin Peret, and Rene Char by Elizabeth R. Jackson, 1976; The Devil in Thomas Mann’s ”Doktor Faust" and Paul Valery’s ”Mon Faust" by Lucie Pfaff, 1976; The Figure of Faust in Valery and Goethe: An Exegesis of ”Mon Faust" by Kurt Weinburg, 1976; Valery by Charles Gammons Whiting, 1978; Figures of Transformation: Rilke and the Example of Valery by Richard Cox, 1979; The Rhetoric of Valery’s Prose Aubades by Ursula Franklin, 1979; Corbiere, Mallarme, Valery: Preservations and Commentary by Robert L. Mitchell, 1981; Valery and the Poetry of Voice by Christine M. Crow, 1982; Valery’s ”Album de vers anciens”: A Past Transfigured by Suzanne Nash, 1983; Paul Valery and Music: A Study of the Techniques of Composition in Valery’s Poetry by Brian Stimpson, 1984; Poetic Principles and Practice: Occasional Papers on Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery by Lloyd Austin, 1987; Narrative Transgression and the Foregrounding of Language in Selected Prose Works of Poe, Valery and Hofmannstahl by Leroy T. Day, 1988; Paul Valery: Philosophical Reflections by William Kluback, 1988; Valery and Poe: A Literary Legacy by Lois Davis Vine, 1992; Paul Valery Revisited by Walter C. Putnam, 1995; Reading Paul Valery: Universe in Mind, edited by Paul Gifford, 1998; Wittgenstein, Kraus, and Valery: A Paradigm for Poetic Rhyme and Reason by Luis Miguel Isava, 2002.
After 20 years of solitude and study (1897-1917), Paul Valery broke his silence in 1917 with a 500-line poem, ”La Jeune Parque” [The Young Fate]. His early poems were collected in Album de vers anciens (Album of Early Verse), and in 1922 his major collection, Charmes [Charms], appeared; this contains ”Le Cimetiere marin” (”The Graveyard by the Sea”), ”Fragments du Narcisse” (”Fragments of the Narcissus”), ”Ebauche d’un serpent” (”Silhouette of a Serpent”), ”Palme” (”Palm”), and other poems. Charmes (meaning ”incantations” or ”poems”) placed Valery in company with the purest of the French poets—with Mallarme, in particular, and with Chenier, La Fontaine, and Racine.
After Charmes, Valery wrote two Platonic dialogues: L’Ame et la danse (Dance and the Soul), a meditation on the movement of a dancer that transforms her from an ordinary woman into a supernatural being; and Eupalinos; ou, L’Architecte (Eupalinos; or, The Architect), a discussion on the genius of the architect and, more generally, any artist who is able to create out of his chosen materials a masterpiece. In a series of five volumes of collected essays, Variete (Variety), Valery discussed several problems of his age and analyzed various literary problems, especially those related to poets with whom he felt close affinity: Mallarme, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, La Fontaine.
For Valery, the poet is the artist who does not stifle any of his inner voices or any of the hidden desires of his nature. His particular vocation forces him to translate and interpret those voices and desires. To do this, he must remain lucid and fully rational. He is not a man inspired by the Muse, but one who must cultivate a universal intelligence and thus not close himself off from any reality. ”La Jeune Parque” describes the successive stages of consciousness in a young girl as she moves from sleep to a full awakening. ”La Pythie” [The Pythoness] is the oracle, convulsed before she can deliver herself of the divine message (or the poem). In composing sonnets like ”L’Abeille” (”The Bee”), ”Les Grenades” (”Pomegranates”) or odes like ”Aurore” (”Dawn”) or the long poems ”Le Cimetiere marin” and ”La Jeune Parque,” Valery accepted all the discipline of the classical style, all the demanding rules of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme. He used metaphors, alliteration, and harmonious effects to sustain the mystery and the enchantment of the poem.
Charmes is the last landmark of French symbolism. From the time of its publication until his death, Valery was an almost official representative of his country’s culture. In today’s language Valery’s mind and attitude would be called that of a contestataire. He decried any doctrine that named literature something sacred and, like his master Mallarme, pointed out the discrepancy between the thought of a man and the words in which he tries to express the thought. The composition of a poem interrupts and distorts the purity of the inner dialogue the poet carries on with himself.
Valery ushered in a movement in French literature in which the poem was preferred to the poet, the study of poetics preferred to the study of the poem, and a literary work studied in its relationship to the general power of language. He treated poetry as something comparable to architecture and music. All three of these arts were for Valery the offspring of the science of numbers. Almost in spite of himself, his work was expressed in words, in poetry, and in accord with that ”inspiration” (a word he disliked) that the contemplation of the sea offered him.
”Le Cimetiere marin,” not his greatest poem perhaps, but the one that has received the greatest attention, restored the forgotten resources of the decasyllabic line of French poetry. The long poem is a monologue in which the poet’s voice speaks of the most basic and constant themes of his emotional and intellectual life associated with the sea and the sunlight as it strikes certain parts of the land bordering on the Mediterranean.
No thinker has considered this age with greater perspicacity and penetration than Valery. And no thinker has demolished it more thoroughly. His fame has been built upon fragments—poems, aphorisms, dialogues, brief essays. He was the supreme example of a writer indifferent to his public, detached from any need to please his public. The actual ”subjects” of his pages are varied: the beauty of a shell, the prose of Bossuet, the method of Stendhal. He tells us that le moi pur is unique and monotonous. Yet it is the deepest note of existence that dominates all the ”varieties” of existence. To hear this note clearly was the goal and the ecstasy of Valery’s intellectual search.
With each essay, with each fragment of prose writing and each poem, Valery extended the hegemony of his thought over most of the intellectual problems facing man today. But the subtlety and suppleness of his writing were such that he never reached, nor wished to reach, the creation of a philosophical system.
It has often been claimed that all of French literature, more than other national literatures, is of a social origin. It seems to come into its own under the stimulation of debate, in an atmosphere of worldliness and mondanite. Valery was for many years, and particularly during the decade of the 1930s, looked upon as an esoteric poet, as a difficult thinker who never left the realm of abstractions, and hence as a writer who stood apart from the central tradition of French letters. But he was in reality a fervent observer of humanity and a man who always strove to express himself in the most meaningful and the most ”social” way. The conquest of le moi pur led Valery through a labyrinth of human experience and human sentiment, from the seeming indifference of Monsieur Teste to the tenderness of the character Lust in the posthumously published volume, Mon Faust. Our entire historical period is in his work—the gravest problems that worry us and the oldest myths that enchant us.
