Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) - in full Ambroise-Paul-Touissaint-Jules Valéry French poet, essayist, and critic, who ceased writing verse for twenty years to pursue scientific experiments. Valéry was a member of the 19th-century poetic school of Symbolism, and its last great representative. Throughout his life Valéry filled his private notebooks with observations on creative process and his own methods of inquiry. He insisted that the mental process of creation was alone important - the poems were a by-product of the effort. "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind", stated Valéry. T.S. Eliot has compared Valéry's analytical attitude to a scientist who works in a laboratory "weighing 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...

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