Paul Valéry facts for kids

Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry (born October 30, 1871 – died July 20, 1945) was a famous French poet, essayist, and philosopher. He wrote many poems and stories. He was also interested in art, history, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times.

Paul Valéry's Life Story

Valéry was born in Sète, a town by the sea in France. His father was from Corsica, and his mother was from Genoa and Istria. He grew up in Montpellier, a bigger city nearby. After school, he studied law at university. Most of his life, he lived in Paris. For a while, he was part of a group of writers around Stéphane Mallarmé.

In 1900, he married Jeannine Gobillard. She was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé's family. Jeannine was also the niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. Paul and Jeannine had three children: Claude, Agathe, and François.

Valéry helped choose winners for the Prix Blumenthal. This award was given to young French artists, writers, and musicians.

Paul Valéry did not become a full-time writer until 1920. Before that, he worked for the Ministry of War. Then, he became a private secretary for about twenty years.

After he was chosen for the Académie française in 1925, Valéry became a very active public speaker. He traveled around Europe, giving talks on culture and society. He also took on many official roles for France. He represented France at the League of Nations on cultural matters. He also served on several important committees.

In 1931, he started the Collège International de Cannes. This school teaches French language and culture. The school is still open today.

In 1932, he gave a main speech in Germany. This was to celebrate 100 years since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died. Valéry and Goethe both loved science, especially biology and optics.

Besides the Académie française, he was also a member of other important groups. These included the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. In 1937, he became the head of what is now the University of Nice. He also held the first Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France.

During World War II, the Vichy government took away some of his jobs. This was because he quietly refused to work with them. But Valéry kept writing and stayed active in French culture. He remained a member of the Académie française.

Paul Valéry died in Paris in 1945. He is buried in his hometown of Sète. This cemetery is famous from his poem Le Cimetière marin.

Paul Valéry's Writings

The Great Silence

Valéry is best known as a poet. Some people think he was the last of the French Symbolist poets. But he published fewer than a hundred poems. On October 4, 1892, during a big storm, Paul Valéry had a major life crisis. This greatly changed his writing. Around 1898, he stopped writing completely. He did not publish anything for almost twenty years. This break was partly because his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé, died. In 1917, he finally started writing again. He published La Jeune Parque when he was forty-six years old.

La Jeune Parque Poem

This poem is a beautiful but sometimes hard-to-understand masterpiece. It has 512 lines and took him four years to finish. It made him famous right away. Along with "Le Cimetière marin," it is seen as one of the greatest French poems of the 20th century.

The title means "The Young Fate." It refers to one of the three Roman goddesses of fate. The poem is written from the point of view of a young woman. She thinks about life, death, love, and nature. She is by the sea, looking at the sky, stars, and cliffs. The poem can also be seen as a way to understand the terrible violence happening in Europe during World War I. It talks about how destruction and beauty are connected.

Other Important Works

Before La Jeune Parque, Valéry mostly published dialogues, articles, and some poems. He also wrote a study about Leonardo da Vinci. In 1920 and 1922, he published two small collections of poems. The first, Album des vers anciens, had older, revised poems. The second, Charmes, made him even more famous as a major French poet. This collection includes Le Cimetière marin, a very well-known poem.

His Writing Style

Valéry's writing style was quite traditional. His poems used rhymes and rhythms in common ways. His work was similar to that of Stéphane Mallarmé. His poem Palme inspired the American poet James Merrill. Valéry's thoughtful poetry also influenced another American poet, Edgar Bowers.

His Prose Works

Valéry also wrote many essays and other prose works. These often included clever sayings and showed a skeptical view of human nature. He believed that government power should be limited. He thought that European culture was great because of its many different peoples. He said that mixing cultures was important for progress. He even wrote that thinking about the "New World" (America) gave him hope for Europe.

Many famous thinkers respected Valéry's ideas. These included Raymond Poincaré, Louis de Broglie, André Gide, Henri Bergson, and Albert Einstein. Valéry often wrote articles on different topics. These were collected in five books called Variétés.

His Famous Notebooks

Perhaps Valéry's most amazing achievement is his huge intellectual diary. It is called the Cahiers (Notebooks). Every morning of his adult life, he wrote something in these notebooks. He once said, "Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day."

Surprisingly, many entries in his Cahiers were about science and mathematics. These topics seemed to interest him even more than his famous poetry. The Cahiers also contain early versions of many clever sayings he later put in his books. These notebooks have been published in English in five volumes.

Paul Valéry in Other Books

One of the quotes in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is from Valéry's "Writing at the Yalu River" (1895).

In the book "El laberinto de la soledad" by Octavio Paz, there are three lines from one of Valéry's poems:

Je pense, sur le bord doré de l’univers
A ce gout de périr qui prend la Pythonisse
En qui mugit l’espoir que le monde finisse.

Selected Works by Paul Valéry

• Conte de nuits (1888)
• Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895)
• La soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896)
• La Jeune Parque (1917)
• Album des vers anciens (1920)
• Le cimetière marin (1920)
• Charmes (1922)
• Eupalinos ou l’Architecte (1923)
• Variétés I (1924)
• La Crise de l'Esprit (1924)
• L'Âme et la Danse (1925)
• Variétés II (1930)
• Regards sur le monde actuel (1931)
• L'idée fixe (1932)
• Moralités (1932)
• Variétés III (1936)
• Degas, danse, dessin (1936)
• Variétes IV (1938)
• Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942)
• Tel quel (1943)
• Variétes V (1944)
• Vues (1948)

In English translation:

• 1964. Selected Writings of Paul Valery.
• 1968. Sketch of a Serpent.
• 1975. Collected Works of Paul Valéry.
• 1977. Paul Valery: An Anthology.
• 1989. The Outlook for Intelligence.
• 2000. Cahiers/Notebooks. Volume I.
• 2020. The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry; A Bilingual Edition.

See also

In Spanish: Paul Valéry para niños