Paul Valery was a French poet, essayist, and critic, who gave up writing for 20 years to pursue work in the scientific arena. His poetic style was based on symbolism and he believed that the mental process of creation was what was really important and that the poetry that he wrote was a by-product of the effort. "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind," stated Valery. T.S. Eliot has compared Valery's analytical attitude to a scientist who works in a laboratory "weighting out or testing the drugs of which is compounded some medicine with an impressive name."
Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation." (from Litterature, 1929)
His quote, "Beauty is a way of death. The novelty, the intensity, the strangeness, in a word, all the values of shock supplant it," can be likened to the hunter who loves the hunt more than the eventual catch. So it is with words for Valery. It is the process, the thinking, the effort that holds a fascination for him -- not the work itself. Perhaps that is because he left the world of literature for the analytical and precise world of science.
We read in Paul Valery's Tel Quel: "Literature is thronged with people who don't really know what to say but feel a compelling urge to write" ("Odds and Ends" 130). A sentence stating a rather harsh, but not exclusively negative, truth, since the "urge to write without knowing what" is presented for what it is: a power. An empty power, but one that, paradoxically, contributes to and perhaps suffices to "fill" literature. And Valery will say about some of the most beautiful verses that they work on us without telling us very much, or that...
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