Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French
Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention before 1917, when he produced
la Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512
alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century. The title was settled on late in the poem's gestation; it refers to the youngest of the three
Parcae (the Roman deities also called
Fates), though the connection with that deity is tenuous and problematic. It is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and separateness, in a setting dominated by sea, sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun. There are, therefore, links with
le Cimetière marin, which is also a seaside meditation on such large themes. Before
la Jeune Parque, Valéry's only publications of note were dialogues, articles, some poems, and a study of
Leonardo da Vinci. In 1920 and 1922 he published two slim collections of verses. The first,
Album des vers anciens (Album of ancient verses), was essentially a revision of early but beautifully wrought smaller poems, some of which had been published individually before 1900. The second,
Charmes (from the Latin
carmina, meaning "songs"; the collection includes
le Cimetière marin, and many smaller poems with very diverse structures), further confirmed his reputation as a major French poet.
Valéry's technique is quite orthodox, in its essentials. His verse rhymes and scans in the traditional ways, and has much in common with the work of
Mallarmé. His poem
Palme inspired
James Merrill's celebrated
1974 poem
Lost in Translation.
His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and
bons mots, reveal a conservative and skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical. But he never said or wrote anything giving aid or comfort to any form of totalitarianism popular (in certain quarters, at least) in his lifetime.
Raymond Poincaré, Louis de Broglie, Andre Gide, Henri Bergson, and
Albert Einstein all respected Valéry's thinking and became friendly correspondents. Valéry was often asked to write articles on topics not of his choosing; the resulting intellectual journalism he collected in five volumes titled
Variétés.
Valéry's most striking achievement is perhaps his monumental intellectual diary, called the
Cahiers (Notebooks). Early every morning of his adult life, he contributed something to the
Cahiers, prompting him to write: "Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day." The subjects of his
Cahiers entries often were, surprisingly, science and mathematics. In fact, arcane topics in these domains appear to have commanded far more of his considered attention than his celebrated poetry. The
Cahiers also contain the first drafts of many aphorisms he later included in his books. To date, the
Cahiers have been published in their entirety only in photostatic reproduction, and only since about 1980 have they begun to receive the scholarly scrutiny they deserve.
