There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. La dormeuse. Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945) : De la mer océane - Le bar à poèmes A glance at the French text and literal (machine) translation shows the problems facing a translator. French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. Yves Bonnefoy, who held Valéry’s chair in poetry at the College de France and succeeded him as the most prominent contemporary French poet, has said in L’Improbable that Valéry had no real influence on his own poetic development. notes sur la grandeur et decadence de l/europe, p. 931 - Paul Valéry La supériorité comme cause de l'impuissance : être incapable d'une sottise qui peut être avantageuse. Services . In 1924, Variety (Variété), a collection of his essays, appeared. … In the face of such statements, Valéry’s scorn for the mystical may seem incongruous, but this attitude is nevertheless a prominent feature of his thought, evident most of all in his contempt for the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Retrouvez toutes les phrases célèbres de Paul Valéry parmi une sélection de + de 100 000 citations célèbres provenant d'ouvrages, d'interviews ou de discours. Why the young man should have been so inspired by this circumstantial evocation of the Narcissus story is perhaps suggested by a line—“I endlessly delight in my own brain”—appearing in a poem written in 1887. Among the celebrities who, along with Zola, took up Dreyfus’s case were Proust, the painter Claude Monet, and Anatole France. And that’s about it.” Poemas famosos de Paul Valéry en español. Date de naissance : Le 31 Octobre 1871 à Sète Date de décès : 20 Juillet 1945 à l'âge de 73 ans Tweeter; Soumettre une texte. Because his mother was Italian and his father was Corsican, Valéry was probably as comfortable speaking Italian as French. The remains that had been found were identified as hers. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science. Valéry passed on an important legacy of influence in American letters, perhaps much greater than his influence on later French poets. Retrouvez toutes les phrases célèbres de Paul Valéry parmi une sélection de + de 100 000 citations célèbres provenant d'ouvrages, d'interviews ou de discours. (With Paul Eluard, Renee Moutard-Uldry, Georges Blaizot, and Louis-Marie Michon), (Author of prefaces with Stephane Mallarme). Paul Valéry. L’Amateur de poèmes. Never was he mistaken—not led instinctively—but lucidly and successfully, he made a synthesis of all the vertigoes.”  The bilingual edition, with David Paul's English translations facing the French texts, includes the autobiographical "Recollection," quoted below, and excerpts on poetry, selected and translated from Valéry's notebooks by James Lawler. It represents a kind of chronicle in which the older poet seeks to recreate the intellectual crisis which led him to reject a nineteenth-century concept of poetry founded on an ethics of Symbolist idealism in favor of a poetry which claims autonomy through critical self-reference.” In 1820, at this place, a skeleton was discovered, and according to local traditions, it was thought to be the tomb of the poet [Edward] Young. Although Mallarmé and French poet Charles Baudelaire had celebrated the visionary qualities in Poe, Valéry most fully admired his powers of reason, as revealed through Poe’s pseudo-scientific meditation on the nature of human knowledge, “Eureka,” and through his brilliant practical logician, Auguste Dupin, the detective of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” “Valéry’s unyielding positivism (rationalism) is thus another characteristic setting him apart from other French writers. His recurrent, even obsessive, denigration of Pascal may reflect Valéry’s fear that his own distinction between science and metaphysics, rationalism and mysticism, might not hold up, that in fact—as is so evident in Valéry’s own “scientific” musings—there might be some mutual contamination of the categories. French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. (Compiler and author of explanatory notes) Rene Descartes. In 1888, he passed the baccalaureat and entered law school, where literature first began to strike a responsive chord in him and he began to make contacts with the Parisian literary group surrounding Mallarmé. He followed the Album of Old Verses with Charms (“songs” or “incantations”) in 1922, and had written his first quasi-Platonic dialogues, Eupalinos; or, The Architect (Eupalinos; ou, L`architecte) and The Soul and the Dance (L’Ame et la danse) in 1921. He was born the same year as Proust, the year of the Paris Commune and the Franco-Prussian War: 1871. Derrida sees Valéry’s formalism as both reflection and instrument of his “repression” of meaning, and indeed, Valéry’s rigid adherence to classical prosody is another trait that sets him very much apart from other 20th-century French poets. Moralités (1932). The French poet, Symbolist leader, and Decadent Paul-Marie Verlaine was born in Metz, Northeast France on March 30, 1844. Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes ; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée ! Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 13: Aesthetics. Le Bois Amical. In a rather secluded corner of this garden, which formerly was much wilder and prettier, there is an arch and in it a kind of crevice containing a slab of marble, which bears three words: PLACANDIS NARCISSAE MANIBUS (to placate the spirit of Narcissa). à prix bas sur Rakuten. 0. He continued writing his Notebooks and began to publish essays—Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (Introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vinci), and his inquiry into dreams, Studies (Etudes). Phaedrus proclaims in this dialogue that “nothing beautiful can be separated from life, and life is that which dies.” The Soul and the Dance deals with the power of art to transcend individuality and the body and to reach toward the absolute. Out of Stock. El cementerio marino. The former dialogue treats much the same topics as “The Seaside Cemetery” (“Le Cimetiere marin”), probably Valéry’s best-known poem: the relationships of life and death, light and darkness, movement and stasis, which compose life itself. 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. Out of Stock. Toute la poésie française du 20ème siècle: Paul Valéry. Valéry’s passion for “scientific speculation,” which is how he preferred to label his metaphysical writing and that of others, was the reason for his lifelong fascination with American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Furthermore, Freud offered the obvious explanation of why Valéry might so vociferously vilify a belief in and search for meaning: the mind’s repressed contents are always sexual. Los pasos. Every beginning is a coincidence; we would have to conceive it as I don’t know what sort of contact between all and nothing. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Every morning he would get up at around five o’clock and write meditations, notes, and speculations in small volumes that he intended for no one but himself. La Fausse Morte. Texte et poèmes / V / Paul Valéry. There exists in Montpellier a botanical garden where I used to go very often when I was nineteen. Her father is supposed to have buried her, on a moonlit night. Some facts about Valéry might predict a less than faultless comportment on Valéry’s part during World War II and France’s occupation by Germany: first, he had been quietly but strongly “anti-Dreyfusard” during the famous Dreyfus affair, in which Emile Zola and others accused the French army and government of anti-Semitism in making a scapegoat of Captain Alfred Dreyfus during his 1894 trial for treason. Liste des citations de Paul Valéry sur amour classées par thématique. All joking apart, you are loathsome. His father, Barthelmy Valéry, was a customs officer at the sea port of Sète, and his mother, Fanny Grassi, who was the daughter of an Italian consul and a descended from Venetian nobility. Paul Valéry. It seems then that the history of the mind can be resumed in these terms: it is absurd by what it seeks, great by what it finds ...  As for the idea of a beginning,—I mean of an absolute beginning—it is necessarily a myth. Find unreal value with everything starting at $1. Michel Philippon, Un souvenir d'enfance de Paul Valéry, éditions InterUniversitaires, 1996. The poem is based on Valéry's musings by the Mediterranean at Sète, where he spent his boyhood. repr. Mallarmé’s ambiguously positive response to Valéry’s early work was reported by Gide: [Gide to Valéry, July 12, 1892] “My friend, Mallarmé has given me your poems; since he criticized them, he must esteem them. La meilleure citation de Paul Valéry préférée des internautes. Paul Valéry Orphée... Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée. Paul Valéry. These views need not be contradictory. (Author of introduction) Martin Huerlimann, photographer. Indeed, Valéry’s poetic output slowed to the merest trickle from 1892 to 1912 because at that time he apparently judged literature not the best medium for “enjoying his brain.”, The events of Valéry’s life clearly influenced the development of his poetic theories and practices. Poèmes de cet auteur. Navigate; Linked Data; Dashboard; Tools / Extras; Stats; Share . Despite Mallarmé’s reservations, several of the poems were published. For me the name Narcissa suggested Narcissus. Au Bois Dormant. charmes paul valery charmes valery poemes paul valery charmes poemes charmer alain paul valery verge commenter valery. This girl, who died in Montpellier toward the end of the eighteenth century, couldn’t be buried in the cemetery, since she was a Protestant. 370 compartilhamentos. Ego scriptor: Poèmes et petits poèmes abstraits. Poème Le Cimetière marin. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Valéry’s work and person, and certainly the one to which he himself would have attached greatest importance, was his cult of the intellectual self. Esbozo de una serpiente Helena. En 1917, sous l’influence de Gide notamment, il revient à la poésie avec La Jeune Parque, publiée chez Gallimard. Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. This was not, in him, an excessive trait but rather a trained and transformed faculty. Valéry would publish four more volumes of Variety in his lifetime. Michel Philippon, Paul Valéry, une poétique en poèmes, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1993. Here the magical, musical spell of a beautiful evening brings Faust rapidly to a high point of pure enjoyment of being ...  ‘Lust’ ... attempts to synthesize extreme existence of mind and body with the extreme experience of love, even if in a very incomplete fashion. ... L’Amateur de poèmes. Corriger le poème. Valéry, it must be admitted, was blinded to a great deal in literature by his obsessive commitment to purity of thought. A Jeannue. Regards sur le monde actuel. Therefore every literary product is an impure product.” The relative purity of Mallarmé, “the Master,” as Valéry called him, was thus entirely congruent with and dependent on both Mallarmé’s total disregard for—indeed, ignorance of—the public taste and his consequent obscurity (no one outside of a very small Parisian circle had read his poems or knew of his existence until well into the twentieth century). De sa grâce redoutable Voilant à peine l’éclat, Un ange met sur ma table Le pain tendre, le lait plat; Il me fait de la paupière Le signe d’une prière Qui parle à ma vision: -Calme, calme, reste calme! Paul Valéry. One of his last works, a two-part dramatic work called “My Faust” (“Mon Faust”), attempted to deal with the issue and was never completed. His family moved to Paris in 1851, where he was enrolled in the lycée. I keep what I want.’”. 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 ... 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.”  “Narcissus Speaks” was immediately celebrated by the Paris literary establishment and selected by Adolphe Van Bever and Paul Leautaud for their important anthology Poets of Today (Poetes d’aujourd’hui). For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. Poemes Paul Valéry - Découvrez les œuvres poétiques de Paul Valéry. tristes lys, je languis de beauté Pour m’être désiré dans votre nudité, Et vers vous, Nymphes, Nymphes, ô Nymphes des fontaines Je viens au pur silence offrir mes larmes vaines. Adicionar à coleção. Texte et poèmes de Paul Valéry. Valéry’s introduction to Gide, by Louis, began a friendship that lasted throughout Valéry’s life and that has been documented in Robert Mallet’s Self-Portraits: The Gide/Valéry Letters, 1890-1942. In Margins of Philosophy Jacques Derrida has discussed Valéry’s aversion to Freud: “We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself. Already in the first act, Faust tells Mephistopheles that he wants only tenderness, not love, from Lust ...  Love is a danger because [it is] so closely related to instincts, to the cyclical and repetitive functions of life ...  And so the intimacy of Lust and Faust is only a fleeting moment in the second act, and the too difficult fourth act was never written.”  A uniquely curated, carefully authenticated and ever-changing assortment of uncommon art, jewelry, fashion accessories, collectibles, antiques & more. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. One might say that he projected the visionary aspect, usually recognized in Poe, onto Pascal, while making Rene Descartes, Pascal’s contemporary, a figure of what he admired in Poe, a logician and scientist. Hélène. The exigencies of a strict prosody are the artifice which confers upon natural language the qualities of a resistant matter.”  Découvrez les poèmes de Paul Valéry, poète, philosophe et écrivain français né le 31/10/1871à Sète (France), décédé le 20/07/1945 à Paris (France). Liste des citations de Paul Valéry sur poeme classées par thématique. Si je regarde tout à coup n’a véri subir cette parole intérieure sans éphémères ; et cette infinité d’en facilité, qui se transforment l’un elles. 14, "Analects," ed. But in how different a situation is the poet! From this point until the end of his life, Valéry was known as the French poet. It contained the essay on Leonardo first published in 1895, the important article on Poe’s “Eureka,” and “Variations on a Thought” (“Variations sur une pensee”), in which he attacked Pascal as a thinker. He was given a state funeral in Paris and buried at the cemetery at Sète, his birthplace and the setting for “The Seaside Cemetery.”  Critics have called Valéry the last French symbolist, the first post-symbolist, a masterful classical prosodist, and an advocate of logical positivism. Since Valéry castigated all such audience-directed writing, he clearly must have felt comfortable with Faust’s activities and motivations and anxious about Lust’s. Valéry conceived himself as an anti-philosopher, and he despised the new discipline of psychology as it was emerging in the work of neurologist and psychoanalytical pioneer Sigmund Freud, because both philosophy and psychology sought to do precisely what he wished to avoid: to interpret, to reduce, the form of thought, event, and act to a content. Paul Valéry. Paul Valéry $20.33. In 1892, Valéry completed work on his law degree and embarked upon an unrequited and, by his own admission, “ludicrous” love affair. He also wrote and published The Evening With Monsieur Teste (La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste, 1896), in which he created the fictional character of Edouard Teste, a paragon of intellectual austerity and self-absorption, an “ideal” thinker, and therefore a role model for Valéry himself. Adicionar à coleção. La meilleure citation de Paul Valéry préférée des internautes. His preoccupation with the intellectual superman had led him to a great interest in the man wielding extreme power, the dictator, the tyrant. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) occupies a key place in French poetry, summing up the charm and technique of the nineteenth century while looking ahead to the psychological preoccupations of the twentieth. All the rest is literature. The role of the nonexistent exists; the function of the imaginary is real; and pure logic teaches us that the false implies the true. Insinuant - le Vin perdu - l'Abeille - trois poèmes de Paul Valéry par Louis Latourrehttp://theatreartproject.com Voir ici une anthologie des poèmes de la langue française. Experience has shown me that what I wanted most is not to be found in another—and cannot find the other capable of trying without reserve to go to the end of the will to ... take love where it has never been.” Neither the period of relative silence from 1892 to 1912 nor the resumption of a poetic vocation resolved this crisis, the dilemma of all Valéry’s life and work: he was never able to bring himself to embrace Lust, though at the end of his life he admitted that she was as integral to him as was the austere, argumentative, and intellectually prudish Faust. Air de Sémiramis. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli. “Lust” allegorizes this profound conflict, never resolved by Valéry. It was rather the sense of my own identity, of a sameness within vast, elusive differences.” It may be in the enduring classicism of Southern letters, passed from Tate to such contemporary Southern writers as Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, and James Applewhite, that Valéry’s voice, through the veil of translation, can be heard most clearly today. Fabien Vasseur commente La Jeune Parque, Poésies, Foliothèque, Gallimard, 2006. Out of Stock. Immediately, however, Faust retreats, and the apotheosis of the garden-scene comes to an end as he turns again to the dictation of his memoirs.”  Acontece o mesmo com o número dos amigos. But it is the glory of man to be able to spend himself on the void; and it is not only his glory. A brief comparison of Valéry’s famous poem “The Young Fate” (“La Jeune Parque”) to Mallarmé’s “Herodiade” concretely illustrates the nature of the older writer’s influence on the young one. He is undoubtedly the last French poet to write such intensely regular verse; to this extent at least his influence on later French poetry has been nil. Trying to think of it one finds that all beginning is a consequence—every beginning completes something.”  He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. James Lawler, probably the most prominent and reliable American critic of Valéry’s work, has, in The Poet as Analyst: Essays on Paul Valéry, convincingly explained Valéry’s interest in “Eureka”: “Quite apart from Poe’s poetics, here was a work that fascinated [Valéry] by its scientific theories, by its poetic subject ... [‘the expression of a generalized will to relativity’] and, significantly, by the form adopted, which coincides, one may say, with Valéry’s own literary practice in La Jeune Parque [The Young Fate] and Charmes [Charms] ... [‘example and enactment of the reciprocity of appropriation’].” In “Eureka” Poe described knowledge and being as part of an interconnected system: “In the original unity of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things, with the germ of their inevitable annihilation.” From Poe’s theory Valéry extracted his own, odd fusion of the visionary and the logical, the mystical and the rational, which he however refused to admit as anything but pure science and logic. Los pasos ( otra versión) . The Graveyard by the Sea, poem by Paul Valéry, written in French as “Le Cimetière marin” and published in 1922 in the collection Charmes; ou poèmes.The poem, set in the cemetery at Sète (where Valéry himself is now buried), is a meditation on death. I wrote at the time the very first Narcissus, an irregular sonnet ... ”  Un grand calme m’écoute, où j’écoute l’espoir. The dead girl’s name was Narcissa. Paul Valéry. For 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. In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry’s verse, the influence of Mallarmé is unmistakable. In 1912, Valéry was persuaded to break his poetical fast by undertaking a major revision of his earlier poems, which would be published under the title Album of Old Verses (Album de vers anciens) in 1920. Teste might be thought of as a precursor of the figure Faust, but without the opposing figure of Lust. This suspicion is also borne out by Valéry’s response to the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson during the German occupation of France during World War II; Valéry publicly admired Bergson but added that he could not accept Bergson’s belief that scientific knowledge was antithetical to the human spirit. A cahier written late in 1898 contains the following multilingual slogans: ‘Le Cesar de soi-meme / El Cesar de sumismo / Il Cesare di se stesso / The Cesar (sic) of himself.’” Furthermore, Valéry was also friendly with Marshal Philippe Petain, one of the leaders of France’s pro-German Vichy government. That inscription had brought on reveries in me, and here, in two words, is its story. In 1922, Édouard Lebey, Valéry’s employer at the French Press Association, died, and the necessity of finding a new source of income further confirmed his revived sense of a literary—a publicly literary—vocation. Idee fixe. Then I developed the idea of the myth of this young man, perfectly handsome or who found himself so in his reflection. His fascination and personal identification with the Narcissus myth is well documented. Valéry’s crisis occurred during an October, 1892 stay in Genoa, Italy. Lunatic researches are akin to unforeseen discoveries. This potentially self-constitutive dimension of the Album was certainly for Valéry its ultimate justification ... [Its somewhat dated tone is] the result of his intention to mount a critical engagement with his heritage, to offer a portrait gallery of predecessors whose faces emerge transfigured and transvalued according to the exigencies of a new poetics.” Thus, Nash continues, “The Album de vers anciens ... is a particularly precious and innovative poetic document, one which holds, inscribed within its structure, the poet’s interpretation of his creative confrontation with his past. During a stormy and sleepless night, he decided that poetry was not the loftiest and purest expression of the mind’s activity. Encantamiento. At first the narrator observes the calm sea under the blazing noontime sun and accepts the inevitability of death. From then until 1912, he wrote little poetry, instead devoting most of his creative energies to the Notebooks. Sur Vergé. Poesía de Paul Valéry Poemas de amor, de amistad, versos, poesía, poemas cortos de poetas del amor. O frères ! Pierre Vidal-Naquet, « Au pire de toi-même. Poe is the only impeccable writer. Paul Valéry suit les « mardis de Stéphane Mallarmé, Rue de Rome », séminaire qui a lieu au domicile du poète dont il restera l’un des plus fidèles disciples. O número dos nossos inimigos varia na proporção do crescimento da nossa importância. Paul Valéry (1871-1945), French poet, essayist. Paul Valéry. A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations. Ode secrète. L’abeille. If I knew [Gide’s friend, writer Maurice] Quillot better, I should have you poisoned. For me, the self ...  Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise.” Responding to 17th-century poet and critic Nicolas Boileau’s time-honored dictum that “my verse, good or bad, always says something,” Valéry asserted in the Notebooks, “There is the principle and the germ of an infinity of horrors.” Personne pure, ombre divine, RETOUR: PERIODES: THEMES: AUTEURS: LIENS: 15eme Siècle: 16eme Siècle: 17eme Siècle: 18eme Siècle: 19eme Siècle: 20eme Siècle: Similar more or less debilitating infatuations symptomatic of Valéry’s extreme but repressed emotionalism and sensitivity occurred throughout his life. Indeed, his anxiety about Lust’s appeal must have been extreme, for he was unable to finish the work. As long as the audience for a text was kept in mind, Valéry wrote in his Notebooks, “there are always reserves in one’s thoughts, a hidden intention in which is to be found a whole stock of charlatanism. In 1889 he read Joris Karl Huysmans’s novelistic manifesto of decadence, Against the Grain (A rebours), in which Mallarmé’s poem “Herodiade” is discussed admiringly, and the following year he met the young writers Pierre Louis and André Gide. {5} Texts: And problems: What Valéry admired so much in Teste was that, as The Evening With Monsieur Teste reveals, he had “killed his puppet.” That is, he did nothing conventional, “never smiled, nor said good morning or good night ... seemed not to hear a ‘How are you?’’ In “Letter From Madame Emilie Teste” (“Lettre de Madame Emilie Teste”), Valéry’s narrator imagined in him “incomparable intellectual gymnastics. “The cosmogonic form,” he wrote in his essay on “Eureka,” “comprises sacred books, admirable poems, excessively bizarre stories, full of beauty and nonsense, physico-mathematical researches of a profundity sometimes worthy of an object less insignificant than the universe. A corollary of these convictions was the idea that no pure literature was possible as long as the writer thought of himself as addressing a public. In Collected Works, vol. 2 mil compartilhamentos. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. Both poems depict a young woman engaged in narcissistic introspection, both embody a severely formal, musical prosody, and both deliberately reject any identifiable “content,” or theme. Here are his own words: ‘I gave up books twenty years ago. Incohérente sans le paraîtr Le cimetière marin | Poème de Paul Valéry. Almost from the beginning of the garden-scene Lust shows her love for Faust, and immediately after Faust’s great monologue, she unconsciously places her hand upon his shoulder. Poemas de Paul Valéry: El bosque amigo. Connais le poids d’une palme Portant sa profusion! par Paul Valéry. What he reproaches psychoanalysis for is not that it interprets in such or such a fashion, but quite simply that it interprets at all, that it is an interpretation, that it is interested above all in signification, in meaning, and in some principal unity—here, a sexual unity—of meaning.”  Poems are the property of their respective owners. On reading them, I imagined them published, but Mallarmé, when I saw him again, didn’t seem to think it desirable.” [Valéry to Gide, July 13, 1892] “[Louis] and You are beastly Semites: one of you, for having underhandedly and covered with a cloak of distance, dared to present my vague alchemies to Mallarmé, the other of you, for having dared even more, in not repeating to me textually the precious and pure panning I deserved from the Master. 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. 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.