Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry was a prominent French poet born in Sète in 1871, who later moved to Montpellier, where he began writing poetry at a young age. Initially expected to pursue a career in law following his father's death, Valéry’s true passion lay in poetry, influenced by the works of Stéphane Mallarmé. He gained recognition as a poet in 1891 with the publication of his early works, including "Narcisse parle." Valéry's poetry often reflects themes of nature and human consciousness, showcasing lush imagery and a deep exploration of identity.
Despite early success, he temporarily abandoned poetry in 1892 to focus on intellectual pursuits, studying figures like Leonardo da Vinci and producing essays that examined the relationship between thought and creativity. It wasn't until 1913 that he returned to poetry, achieving significant acclaim with his work "La Jeune Parque," which delves into complex themes of existence and acceptance. Valéry's later writings, including "Le Cimetière marin," further explore the interplay between life, death, and the human condition. Recognized for his contributions to literature, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1925 and continued to influence modern poetry until his death in 1945. Valéry's legacy is characterized by his inquiries into the self and the nature of artistic creation, making him one of the key figures in early twentieth-century French literature.
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Paul Valéry
French poet and critic
- Born: October 30, 1871
- Birthplace: Sète, France
- Died: July 20, 1945
- Place of death: Paris, France
Valéry was one of the most important French poets of the early twentieth century. He also made significant contributions to literary criticism and philosophy.
Early Life
Paul Valéry (pahl vah-lay-ree) was born in Sète, France, in the western Mediterranean. The family moved to the larger town of Montpellier in 1884 when Valéry was thirteen; he was already writing poems at this early age, but the family expected him to become a lawyer. The expectations of his family were increased when Valéry’s father died in 1888, and so a year later Valéry entered the University of Montpellier to study law. After reading works by Stéphane Mallarmé, however, Valéry knew that his true vocation was as a poet, not a lawyer. He began to acquire a circle of friends who shared his interests in literature, including his lifetime friend, André Gide. In 1891, he published two important poems, “La Fileuse” and the much praised “Narcisse parle,” in a small review. He was established as a poet, and so he moved to Paris, where he became a friend of his master, Mallarmé.
Life’s Work
Valéry’s early poems celebrate the wonders of nature; their major stylistic features are an evanescent mood and lush imagery. “Le Fileuse” portrays those powers of nature operating while an old woman who is spinning a thread falls asleep. Nature is the active agent; a spring waters the flowers and a stem bends to the wind. The human spinner dreams and sleeps.
The rose, your sister, where a saint delights
Nature, although invisible, is the real power and presence in the poem; the woman is a mere receptacle.
“Narcisse parle” is a longer and more important poem that uses the myth of Narcissus. Valéry was obsessed with the figure of Narcissus and wrote about him a number of times. In this early poem, Narcisse wanders in nature seeking “Some face that never wept.” He is divided and incomplete, an early exploration by Valéry of consciousness and the failure to achieve unity. Once more, much of the poem is devoted to the force and activity of nature. For example, Narcisse speaks of the “waters” as a God. He cannot, however, find the peace of the old woman in “Le Fileuse”; he remains “restless” until the union with this shadowy other is consummated. At the end of the poem, he remains solitary and can only bid farewell to what cannot be.
Alas: wretched flesh, it is time to be at one . . .
After this early success, Valéry was forced to decide whether to continue with poetry or to “cultivate his mind.” Should he be Orpheus or Narcissus? He had always been interested in the human consciousness and the best way to achieve the “true self,” or unity, and poetry was only one aspect of the human mind. It has been suggested that this crisis came about as a result of an unhappy love affair. Whatever the reason, Valéry decided in 1892 to abandon poetry. He moved to Paris, began to study and to record his thoughts in notebooks. These labors led to a study of Leonardo da Vinci, a figure who was not restricted to one mode of creation, and to the books on his character Monsieur Teste.
“Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci” (1895; “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,” 1929) is an attempt by Valéry to reconcile the conflicting claims of the artist and the thinker in the figure of Leonardo. Valéry had been forced to choose thought over art and could not reconcile them in his own person. The essay reveals much about Valéry’s inner conflict. He contrasts the fragmented “consciousness” that can only end in “exhaustion” and despair, while the universal genius, such as Leonardo, can turn his hand to any activity and create something. He can accomplish this by restraining his ego. This formulation seems to be very similar to that of John Keats. Keats contrasted the poet of the “egotistical sublime,” who could only create out of himself, with the one who had achieved “negative capability” and could, therefore, create any type of character. For Valéry, the best poetry was not a turning loose of emotion but a process of the mind.
The cycle on Monsieur Teste is a continuation of the Leonardo essay. Teste is seen as a thinking machine, a pure intellect. Teste is discovered, for example, doing material “gymnastics,” discovering “angles” while others waste their time and minds and fail to perceive the patterns around them. Such an abstract thinking machine might seem repellent to those schooled in the Romantic tradition, but to Valéry it was an antidote to Romantic self-indulgence. He continually celebrated the discipline of the human mind and sought unity of consciousness.
In 1913, Valéry returned to poetry. He wrote a few minor poems, but he worked on one poem from 1913 to 1917 and published it as La Jeune Parque (1917; the young fate). The poem is very obscure but has a lulling sound and beautiful imagery; it also tantalizes the reader to decipher its meaning. For any or all these reasons, the poem became an immediate success, and Valéry was recognized as an important modern poet. One possible way to explicate the poem is to divide it into three parts. The first part is the awakening of the youngest Fate to sexual feelings, which are symbolized by the snake. This awakening is described with images of burning, coiling, and rioting; it is discomfiting but cannot apparently be resisted. The second part of the poem turns from the disturbances of the senses to a joyous celebration of nature. This moment of ecstasy, however, cannot be sustained, and the Fate accepts life with all its questions and uncertainties. This acceptance is a prominent theme in the major poems of Valéry and can be discovered in his own rejection of and return to poetry.
After the success of La Jeune Parque, Valéry published a collection of poems that he called Charmes, ou poèmes in 1922. There is one poem in Charmes, ou poèmes that has been recognized as Valéry’s masterpiece “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the Sea,” 1946). The situation is one with which many poets have dealt: the poet in the graveyard. At first, Valéry notes the “forms” of nature surrounding him in the incessant activity. The moment of peace vanishes as he contemplates his self as a changing being and the dead as reduced to nothing. He then attempts to provide some compensation by seeing death as a “womb”; however, he quickly rejects that easy answer as mere feigning and falls into despair. He soon triumphs over the despair brought on by the “worm unanswerable” and the paradoxes of Zeno. He turns back to life, to nature, and resolves: “We must try to live!” The ending is very similar to the acceptance found at the end of La Jeune Parque.
In 1925, Valéry was elected to the Académie Française. Having thus achieved recognition as one of France’s greatest poets, he set about to make himself a man of letters, not simply a poet. He published many essays, introductions, prefaces, and extracts from his Les Cahiers (1957-1961; notebooks). Perhaps of greatest interest are his essays on poetry and the nature of the poet. Valéry makes a distinction between the Romanticism of Victor Hugo and the classicism of Charles Baudelaire; the difference is that Baudelaire subjects the material in his poetry to an unrelenting criticism, an intellectual technique of analysis. Valéry, however, did not discount the importance of inspiration for the poet; he believed that, while feeling may be the origin of the poem, the poet must discipline and contain it by analysis, by the mind. In addition, on many occasions Valéry also insisted that poetry must be “pure.” He tried to connect poetry to music and create a poetry in which the formal aspects, the internal relationships, are dominant.
In 1937, Valéry was appointed to the chair of poetics at the Collège de France, and he continued lecturing during the war years and German Occupation; he courageously resisted any attempts to censor his thought. A collection of poems written at various times in the past was published in 1942. In 1945, Valéry, still busily at work, died on July 20. Two significant works were published after his death, Mon Faust (1946; My Faust , 1960) and “L’Ange.”
My Faust is a fragment of a play in the form of a dialogue. In the early part of the play, Faust has reversed the traditional position and now dominates Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles attempts to tempt Faust by offering him, among other things, the glory of completing a book he has been contemplating. Faust rejects Mephistopheles by claiming that humankind has got beyond the narrow range of views that the devil represents. Even good and evil are to be questioned, although it is clear that the soul is immortal. In the last section, Faust leads Mephistopheles to the heights of a cliff to contemplate humankind below. Faust is uncertain that humans can rise above their limited perspective and rise to the heights that only mind can give. It is a plea for a higher consciousness and a recognition of limitations. Valéry does not provide an answer but a goal to seek.
Significance
Valéry remains an important poet and thinker. He always doubted the value of poetry but must be ranked as one of the most significant French poets of the early twentieth century. His masters and models, however, such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé, are of the nineteenth century. He was not an innovator as the Surrealists or Dadaists were; he was, in fact, one of the last poets to follow the classical rules of French verse. His poetry is marked by lush imagery and lulling sound effects. Within the “pure” poetry, Valéry is constantly exploring and seeking the unified self, the true self. The main concern of his life and his work is the human consciousness. He was not a Leonardo or a Monsieur Teste but one who was aware of the possibility of a higher and more complete human being. His major works from “Narcisse Parle” through La Jeune Parque to the final meditations of Faust deal with the conflict of a divided self and the search to attain a unified one.
Bibliography
Crow, Christine M. Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972. A scholarly treatment of Valéry’s various views on the human mind. The book is very good on the sources of Valéry’s thought. It also deals in depth with Valéry’s treatment of nature, which other critics have ignored.
Grubbs, Henry A. Paul Valéry. New York: Twayne, 1968. A broad view of Valéry’s life and works without much detailed discussion of specific works. While it does not significantly explore Valéry’s theories of consciousness, this volume provides a useful introduction for students.
Hytier, Jean. The Poetics of Paul Valéry. Translated by Richard Howard. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966. The best book on Valéry’s poetics. There is a detailed discussion of the intellectual background of Valéry’s work, the uses of inspiration, and Valéry’s methods of composition.
Kluback, William. Paul Valéry. 2 vols. New York: Peter Lang, 1999-2000. These two books are part of a series in which Kluback examines Valéry’s poetry that expresses the workings of the human mind. A good analysis.
Mackay, Agnes Ethel. The Universal Self: A Study of Paul Valéry. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1961. An excellent study of Valery’s major works. The author provides detailed, specific, and enlightening discussions of the major works. The discussion of consciousness is directly connected to the major works.
Thomson, Alastair W. Valéry. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1965. A very short though rather in-depth volume that traces Valéry’s life and poetry from the early years to the late years. Contains a bibliography.