And this, very important.” But Valéry also declared: “For him: the work. As he put it in his Notebooks, “In sum, Mallarmé and I, this in common-poem is problem. In his view, thought-the mirror-like refraction of the human mind-was always an end in itself poetry was simply a more or less desirable by-product, to be pursued as long as it stimulated the mental processes. Yet although Mallarmé believed that the end product of thought had to be a poem, Valéry disagreed. ![]() that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea.”įor Mallarmé, as for his younger disciple, Idea was not a theme that could be formulated in a sentence or two it was not a thought but rather the ongoing process of thought within the mind. Valéry’s Notebooks ( Cahiers) record his conviction that the subject of a poem was far less important than its “program”: “A sort of program would consist of a gathering of words (among which conjunctives are just as important as substantives) and of types of syntactical moments, and above all a table of verbal tonalities, etc.” Mallarmé had said something very similar in “Music and Letters” (“La Musique et les lettres”): “I assert, at my own aesthetic risk. ![]() In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry’s verse, the influence of Mallarmé is unmistakable. On the other hand, he is understood as having broken away from symbolism, as having rejected the cult of poetry for its own sake in favor of a cult of the mind. ![]() Critics have called Valéry the last French symbolist, the first post-symbolist, a masterful classical prosodist, and an advocate of logical positivism. Clearly, Valéry was heir to the symbolist tradition of another French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he knew and venerated, who encouraged his early work, and whose other young disciples-Pierre Louis in particular-got Valéry’s work published. French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871.
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