Poems

by Paul Valéry

Volume one of the 'Collected Works of Paul Valery' constituting Number XLV in the Bollingen Series, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation.

With a 'Note on the Translations' by David Paul, selections from 'On Poets and Poetry,' selected and translated from the Notebooks by James R. Lawler, and 'Notes and Commentaries' by James R. Lawler.

Genres: Poetry, France, French Literature, 20th Century, Literature, Classics

490 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

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.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the zenith piercing the azure the sun glitters
In the sea's orbicular and blue mirror.
The golden arrows hurling from the fiery sky's height
Are heavily engulfed in the calm flat main.

And the odorous swell of the open sea dilates
Sinuously lengthens and then rises slightly
Like a sacred serpent under the fixed gaze of a God.
Day sinks. The surge is steeped in scarlet.

Sunk in the ocean of translucent blazonries
The sun, as a dying bird plunges, has set,
And evening's gold is lost in the Eternal tomb.

A wave scarcely rises and then falls
Whilst the beauty in the gloomy crepe spreads—
Night the mysteriom with her numberless eyes.

[Ezekiel · Rating 3 out of 5]

No tengo la paciencia para leer dónde se publicó primero tal o cual poema en un poemario de +400 páginas pero lo que es la poesía en si, ha merecido la pena leerlo.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Valéry est regardée très bien comme un poète, bien que je ne le vois cité que pour ses œuvres proses -- Monsieur Teste, ses dialogues platoniques. Mais William Gass pensait de lui si hautement qu'il le listait avec Yeats, Rilke, et Wallace Stevens (qui etait meme plus d'un fan du Valéry) comme les meilleurs poètes de toutes le temps. Ils, ces poesies du Valéry, commencent comme on s'attend, fantaisies lyriques (et féériques) dans le style du Baudelaire. Dans « La Jeune Parque », toutefois, Valéry développe cet modele à hauteurs monstreuses, un monologue presque hysterique sur le puissance illimittee du imagination poetique, qui est aussi intensque que le « Duino Elegies » et peut-etre plus profond. Puis est son collection central, « Charmes », un livre plus développée -- longs poèmes comme « Ebauche d'un Serpent » et « Fragments du Narcisse », qui est plus loin passé « La Jeune Parque », et qui présente un portrait metaphysique d'un univers consisté d'égoïsme primitif et dialectiques uncertaines dans flux. Comme Baudelaire, il n'abandonne jamais les modes poétiques traditionnels -- tetrametres, ballades, alexandrines, et il entretien même les « tenebres » et « funebres » du Baudelaire; mais le philosophie delirieux du Valéry, qui est demi entre son deux successeurs en Stevens and les Surrealistes (et pour qui il soi-meme est comme un séquelle schizophrénique) -- c'est peut-être le plus intense que j'ai vu.

Les poèmes ultérieurs, peut-être trop de méditée sur leurs idees, il manque quelque cette électricité et commence à dire explicitement plutôt que demontrer. Le fini est trois drames pour le theatre: un autre version de les 'Framgents du Narcisse', et deux versions symbolistes de rituels mythopeiques. Celles, comme plusieurs masques, sont plus intéressant pour imaginer en mise en scène que pour lire.

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Come invecchia il simbolismo

Forse per il periodo estivo, forse per una disposizione non favorevole, non sono riuscito ad apprezzare i versi di Valery: troppo classicismo estetista portato verso una perfezione formale fin troppo intoccabile, troppo parnassianesimo cesellato e austero - mi sono perso dietro immagini lontane e perfette....
Si colgono temi interessanti come il ritorno del sonno, dell'oblio, del risveglio come cifra di una vita fatta di morti e rinascite - e sicuramente c'è una perfezione formale altissima, ma non sono riuscito a cogliere la vita vissuta in questi versi.
Migliore di tutte le pagine resta in ogni caso il poemetto "La Giovane Parca" dove le riflessioni della semi-dea che ha in mano i nostri destini si spezzano in frantumazioni dell'io, in distacco dalle parti del proprio corpo, in appelli alla propria mente e anima. Una scissione dell'identità assolutamente moderna, seppure in una veste totalmente classica (o classicista)

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ahora nos pertenecemos. Nos confundimos. Nos amamos..."

[Ethelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

COUP DE COEUR

Ça fait longtemps que je n’ai pas aimé autant un recueil de poèmes!


Poèmes préférés:
La fileuse
Naissance de Vénus
Le bois amical
Épisode
Profusion du soir
L’amateur de poèmes
Poésie
Les pas
Fragments de narcisse
Les rêves
Les muses
L’oiseau cruel
À l’aurore
La caresse

[salva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un feu distinct m’habite, et je vois froidement
La violente vie illuminée entière…
Je ne puis plus aimer seulement qu’en dormant
Ses actes gracieux mélangés de lumière.

[Sarah Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ma découverte de seconde ! j'adore

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I note here together the volumes "Poems (Collected Works of Paul Valery, Vol. 1)" and "Paul Valery: An Anthology," only because both at the moment must be returned to their owners. I confess to being unfamiliar with Valéry and that these texts (along with some few critical essays) are my only introduction. Regrettably I find that these alone lead me to little more than a vague impression of either Valéry in general or of the writing here reproduced or excerpted.

The bulk of my trouble is simply that the French of the verse is far beyond me and ultimately, I suspect, largely untranslatable, at least by the methods employed here by Mr. Lawler, who seems usually more intent on creating an honest record than making or recreating poems. Valéry himself says, in another context: "If a verse produces an exact meaning, one that can be translated by another expression, this meaning destroys it."

But even limited to the prose pieces included (some selections from the Notebooks and from 'Monsieur Teste,' the 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,' 'Poetry and Abstract Thought,' etc., which constitute only a fraction of these two volumes) I remain at a loss.

Given Valéry's famously obsessive self examination (his Notebooks were published in 1961 in 29 volumes of some 30,000 pages) it is easy to read the prose here as little more than Valéry reflecting on Valéry -- Valéry as da Vinci, Valéry as M. Teste, etc. -- a claim I can more readily imagine Valéry minutely qualifying than ever denying.

But if Valéry's self examination was obsessive, it was not wholly naïve. He is patently an experienced traveler in his phenomenological world, well provisioned with cigarettes and coffee, and his account is often absorbing if only, as in the selections from the Cahiers, in postcard form.

In 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' though, we have a longer more coherent report, even if the landscape is still largely Valéry, and I'll leave off my comment by noting a figure Valéry uses in that essay, a figure which while represented by its author as an actual dispatch from the interior, resonates with me as something more akin to fable or parable:

Valéry speaks (as he often does) of two sorts of language:

"One of them tends to bring about the complete negation of language itself. I speak to you, and if you have understood my words, those very words are abolished. If you have understood, it means the words have vanished from your mind and are replaced by their counterpart, by images, relationships, impulses; so that you have within you the means to retransmit these ideas and images in a language that may be very different from the one you received. Understanding consists in the more or less rapid replacement of a system of sounds, intervals, and signs by something quite different, which is, in short, a modification or interior reorganization of the person to whom one is speaking. And here is the counterproof of this proposition: the person who does not understand repeats the words, or has them repeated to him."

Some pages later he repeats himself:

"…utilitarian language…the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard. I have given it forth to perish, to be radically transformed into something else in your mind; and I shall know that I was understood by the remarkable fact that my speech no longer exists: it has been completely replaced by its meaning -- that is, by images, impulses, reactions, or acts that belong to you: in short, by an interior modification in you."

Poetry then, is obviously that language which does not find its completion in self destruction but which "become(s) endlessly what it has just been."

I will not argue any of this: if this is how language necessarily functions, if there is indeed a meaningful distinction between "utilitarian" language and something otherwise, etc., but only repeat how this "demonstration" somehow strikes me with the force of fable, of parable; with the sense of something hidden, something with the power of a poem perhaps, something I can not quite put into (other) words, something which will not go away.

Elsewhere in 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' Valéry writes: "The mind is terribly variable, deceptive and self-deceiving, fertile in soluble problems and illusory solutions." I am glad for the small bits of witness gleaned here, and regret that the verse, whatever its nature, remains inaccessible.

[Kim Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lire et à relire.
En revanche, j'ai du mal à comprendre pourquoi une collection d'œuvres intitulée 'Poésies' contient environ un quart de théâtre. Théâtre qui d'ailleurs n'est pas du tout à mon goût.

[adèle · Rating 3 out of 5]

aujourd'hui je suis allée au cimetière marin; il faisait vraiment très beau, et c'était la température parfaite pour un mois de janvier (beaucoup trop élevée pour un mois de janvier). au cimetière marin, je me suis assise sur le banc en face de la tombe de paul valéry et j'ai regardé la mer. et je pense qu'il faut vraiment faire cette expérience pour comprendre les poésies de paul valéry. l'expérience de la MER. C'EST TRÈS BLEU ?? essayez de me convaincre que "le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre / l'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre" n'est pas une des plus belles lignes de la poésie française. essayez. en fait n'essayez pas ça ne servirait à rien (ps pour les rageux: oui j'ai vu le vent se lève. oui c'est mon 3e ghibli préféré. oui c'est dans le vent se lève que j'ai entendu cette phrase. anecdote : je ne savais pas que c'était de paul valéry jusqu'à lire les poésies. j'ai adoré, 10/10 merci paul).
je suis une grosse rageuse, j'ai mis 3 étoiles car malheureusement les attentes étaient très hautes et j'ai été un peu déçue de me rendre compte que tous les poèmes n'égalaient pas l'air immense. mais bon, ces petites choses de la vie.

[Edragone · Rating 4 out of 5]

4

Défi poésie

L'ISBN correspond à un recueil d'Abraham de Vermeil, comme la couverture, et non pas à Valéry.

Il s'agit d'un poète baroque qui a écrit à la fin du XVIè et début du XVIIè. Ses textes sont relativement épurés, agréables à lire et il se diversifie dans la métrique. Il écrit des odes pindariques, des sonnets, des épigrammes, des muzains (forme qui semble être quasi uniquement pratiquée par lui : un quatrain et un quintil qu'on considère parfois comme un seul neuvain).
Les vers, qui peuvent porter sur la Henri IV ou la cour, permettent de portraiturer des amours agréables. J'ai apprécié la sensibilité du poète et l'ai préféré à Saint-Gelais lu précédemment.

[Victoire Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baignée
Valvins
Été
Anne
Le rameur

[Ronja · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 glaube ich muss mir ein Zitat hieraus tätowieren :)

[Rose]

2,75

[mae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man that dude could write