The Poetry of Valéry by Paul Valéry

First published:La Jeune Parque, 1917; Album de Vers Anciens, Poemes 1890-1893, 1920; Charmes, 1922 (Charms, 1971)

Critical Evaluation:

Paul Valery said that while making poems he always watched himself at work on them. This statement is a good place to begin a consideration of Valery’s poetry, for it reveals the super-consciousness of a writer whose major theme and inspiration are super-consciousness. Thought and the process of thought interested Valery above all other things; and in an effort to make poetry of these concerns he followed the lead of the French Symbolist movement in attempting to write a “pure” poetry in which thought itself would be purely felt without the impurities and lack of clarity that the use of language usually involves.

Valery’s idea of pure poetry was much influenced by the thought of Mallarme, whom the young Valery knew and admired. Poetry is not, Valery insisted, prose dressed up with pretty and poetical devices; a poem cannot be reduced to the expression of a mere idea. The thing we experience when we truly feel a poem is revelation and communication of a poetic state which involves the thinking, feeling being. The experience of a poetic state, which is the whole reason for the poem’s existence, cannot be translated into any other form of expression than the poem itself without destroying the unique poetic state. Each poem is a construct that lives only for and by itself. Poetry uses language to make in each individual poem a “language within language” that can only be understood within the world of the particular poem; a language that can be understood only after reading and rereading have brought a full experiencing of the individual poem. When the reader understands this “language within language,” he is immersed in the poetic world the poet has created. It is a world of poetic music, harmony, and resonance arising from the interplay of the sound and connotations as well as from the denotations of the words in the poem. When the reader is thus immersed in the poetic world, the true pure text of the poem is “created” in the sensibility, the structure of aesthetic response.

The union of the reader’s mind and the poem is impossible in prose, or in “impure” poetry which is based on the statement of ideas rather than on the exploitation of the meanings within words that the true poet releases by his harmonic and musical arrangement and juxtaposition of words in pure poetry. Pure poetry is poetry that finds its world within the relationship of words, not in the relationship of words and the things they refer to.

Since pure poetry can only be known as it is actually being felt by a reader, pure poetry exists only as it is actually being said aloud, and heard, and experienced: only when we are being made the sensitive instrument upon which the poem plays. As we read the poem our voice, our intelligence, our sensibility are shaped into a single experience by the art of the poet: the letters printed on the page are not the poem; the experience of the poem is the poem. Valery has made his best statement on pure poetry in his LITTLE NOTEBOOK OF A POET (CALEPIN D’UN POETE).

Committed as he was to a poetry of pure intellect, Valery played down the idea of poetic inspiration in favour of an emphasis on the poet’s conscious labor and construction. He did not deny that the poet feels a kind of creative energy as he contemplates and writes. But the task of the poet is to make his readers feel inspired, not himself. To accomplish this task the poet must always be aware of what he is doing, of how he is doing it; he must be in total control. The poet must go beyond mere inspiration. Pure poetry is the product not of enthusiasm and accident, but choice and conscious work by the poet who has the idea of pure poetry constantly in mind.

The poet, for Valery, is a professional. The characteristics of the poetic profession are patience, conscious effort, and knowing how to discern and use what is poetic in chance ideas and observations. The poet must wait for the germ of a poem to appear. When the germ does present itself, the poet must know how to exploit it and how to resist the impulse to stop work, to “finish” the poem. The poet is an “architect of poems” who is concerned with the problems of expression: it is not with ideas that poems are made, but with words. Feeling this way, it is no surprise that Valery valued the controlled art of classicism more than the effusions of the Romantics. He did not protest against rigid rules, forms, and restrictions of vocabulary; on the contrary, he saw in such restrictions the very source of poetic greatness. They are devices by which the poet may more fully control his language.

Valery is often accused of being an obscure poet. His obscurity, however, is not a systematic effect sought after, as it is in the poetry of Mallarme. It is the result of the genesis of Valery’s poetry and its subject matter. The poems arose from years of examination of his own thought, the processes of thought, and the idea of pure intellect that occupied him for over twenty years. Further, the subtle ideas that obsessed the poet are virtually impossible to catch in language. Valery claimed that language was not constructed to express precisely the complex states of mind and soul of a complex man: and these things are exactly what he wanted to express in his poetry. Further, obscurity in poetry is a problem both of the complexity of the poem and the complexity of the person who reads the poem. Valery unhesitatingly affirmed that his poetry was for the happy few. Only a complex man can understand a complex poem, and such understanding will never be easy, for complexity is the opposite of ease.

The poetic production of Valery is very slim. He published only two small volumes of verse: ALBUM DE VERS ANCIENS and CHARMES. The first of these, published in 1920, is made up of poems Valery wrote in his youth in the early 1890’s before he had renounced poetry as the result of a personal crisis in 1892. The poems are interesting in that they reflect the formative Symbolist influences on young Valery and because they foreshadow to some extent the later poetry, and in many ways “Narcissus Speaks,” one of these early poems, is a promise of what was to come. In this poem the mythological Narcissus (an appropriate symbol in the poetry of a man almost completely concerned with the nature of his own being) languishes in his pure love for his own chaste beauty. He becomes identified with his image as he kisses the still water of a reflecting pool and vanishes in the resulting crystalline ripple.

When he was asked in 1912 by Andre Gide to put his old verse together in the volume that became the 1920 edition of ALBUM, Valery still did not intend to write any new poetry. But as he was working over one of the pieces that was to be included in the book, he became engrossed in the problems of writing and began to work on what was to be his first mature poem. After four years of work, and the expansion of a few old lines into a new 512-line poem, Valery published “The youngest of the Fates” (“La Jeune Parque”), in 1917. At one stroke his new style was achieved. The main theme of the poem is the motion of a consciousness during a sleepless night. The three Fates symbolized to the ancients the various stages of a man’s life. Valery’s choice of the youngest Fate as his symbol is proper to this poem in which a consciousness first begins to be aware of itself and to gain self-knowledge. The consciousness in the poem experiences her past and considers the problems of the conscious being conscious of itself: a young girl in the adolescent crises.

All the rest of Valery’s poetry appeared in his CHARMES. This volume contains only twenty-one poems—Valery’s entire oeuvre totals a mere forty-three. The poems in CHARMES had first appeared in literary magazines after the publication of “The Youngest of the Fates” and they, like the “The Youngest,” had attracted a great deal of attention. Valery was elected to the French Academy in 1925 on the strength of CHARMES.

The premiere piece in CHARMES, Valery’s greatest and best-known poem, is “The Cemetery Beside the Sea” (“Le Cemetiere Marin”). This poem, like all of Valery’s work, is untranslatable, if only because of its dependence for effect on the music of the French language. Every language has its own musical possibilities which are unique to it alone and which, thus, have no equivalents in other languages. Valery, more than most poets, depended on the genius of his mother tongue for his poetic effects, and these effects can be known only if the poems are read (and heard) in French. The basic situation of “The Cemetery Beside the Sea” is all that can be described here; this description must not be confused with the poem itself. They can be only distantly related.

The theme of the piece is Valery’s own dilemma. The poet always was torn between the desire to participate in the active life and the desire to withdraw into pure contemplation; contemplation, indeed, of contemplation itself. The poet goes in imagination to the cemetery beside the sea in his home town. He had dreamed there in his youth. At high noon among the graves and tombs he contemplates the sea, which seems to him to be the essence of changelessness. He is at peace and is motionless. He is existing in perfect thought, yet he is anxious and uneasy; he sees signs that he in fact exists in change, that things do not hold eternal perfection but that they change. One flaw in perfection that the poet sees is his own doubt of perfection—this is his proof. Even doubt must die; even the thought of imperfection cannot be perfect. The poet sees that he must live, that he cannot escape into pure abstraction and thought.