¶ … Paul Valery [...] Paul Valery quote "Beauty is a way of death. The novelty, the intensity, the strangeness, in a word, all the values of shock supplant it." Beauty is as intense, as strange, as novel as anything we know and appreciate. This paper will answer the question: Why is beauty so difficult to define?
BEAUTY AND NOVELTY
Paul Valery wrote, "Beauty is a way of death." This of course can be defined in many ways. Some beautiful people believe they can trust no one, because they are not appreciated for who they are, but only for their beauty, so no one really knows what is inside them. This is a form of slow death for them - never knowing, never trusting. There are other forms of beauty however, that can be strange, or novel, or intense, and this is what Valery seems to be discussing in his quote. The beauty of a magnificent sunset could be an example of the beauty he is thinking of. A beautiful sunset is novel, for it can never...
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
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