Moi / The Collected Works of Paul Valery, Vol. 15

by Paul Valéry, Jackson Mathews (Editor)

A selection of writings that portray the inner life of the artist. Included are several short autobiographical pieces in which Valéry talks about his early childhood, his adolescence, his military experience, his travels, his poetry, and his acquaintances. The volume contains selections from the Valéry-Gide and Valéry-Fourment correspondence and two additional pieces, "The Avenues of the Mind," a magazine interview with Valéry printed in 1927, and Pierre Feline's "Memories of Paul Valéry."

Originally published in 1975.

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436 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1975

About the author

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

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. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of 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.