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Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 12: Degas, Manet, Morisot
The full text of Valéry's book on Degas, with a long essay on Corot, others on Berthe Morisot, Manet, and Daumier, a personal recollection of Renoir, and writings on sculpture, portraiture, Italian painting, and several minor arts.
263 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1989
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About the author
Paul Valéry
563 books459 followersAmbroise-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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 28, 2007
French poets have written the best art criticism. Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery are models of the 'ecrivain artiste'--minds so aesthetically sagacious that no human artistic mode is foreign or without significance to them. I love how Valery's mind works.
February 14, 2020
3.5? I'm having difficulty rating this one.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews