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Paul Valéry | The Poetry Foundation

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French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. 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. 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. These views need not be contradictory. In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry’s verse, the influence of Mallarmé is unmistakable. 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 whic

French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. 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. On the other hand, he is understood as having broken away from symbolism, as having rejected

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