One of the most important French poets of the twentieth century, Paul Valéry (1871-1945) influenced generations of poets who came after him. Major poets in England and America, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden, agreed that he should be better known in the English-speaking world. However, his complex and graceful writing presents daunting obstacles for the translator, who must capture the motions of a subtle intellect while recreating the rhythms and rhymes that entranced the poet’s French contemporaries. This volume is the culmination of 50 years devoted to bringing Valéry’s poems into fluent English. It shows the writer to be both the supreme poet of the mind and a consummate linguistic musician. Readers curious to encounter “The Graveyard by the Sea” will find it brilliantly rendered here, along with other masterpieces in both long and short forms. This is a book for every lover of language and ideas.

A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valéry, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century. Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry’s lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary “exercise of thought,” a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works—Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms—with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem “The Angel.” Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

Poems ranging from "La Jeune Parque" and "Le Cimetière marin" to occasional and light verse written as letters to friends, dedications in books, and inscriptions on ladies' fans demonstrate the wide scope of Valéry's lyric preoccupation. The bilingual edition, with David Paul's English translations facing the French texts, includes the autobiographical "Recollection," quoted below, and excerpts on poetry, selected and translated from Valéry's notebooks by James Lawler. Paul Valéry turned to the discipline of poetry during the First World War, to escape from the "commotion of a world gone mad." "I fashioned myself a poetry," he wrote, "that had no other law than to establish for me a way of living with myself, for a part of my days." Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Originally published in 1999, this was the first comprehensive account of the work of the French modernist writer Paul Valéry.

"First Princeton paperback printing, 1985. Second Princeton paperback printing, 1989"--Verso of t.p. Originally published in 1958.

All of the major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry by one of the greatest poets of our time--and perhaps the one who has most scrupulously analyzed his art--are included in The Art of Poetry. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a poet and essayist, and along with Verlaine and Mallarme is regarded as one of the most important Symbolist writers, and an influence on poets from Eliot to Ashbery. He had a quiet life by many standards, but in one respect it was exemplary, even legendary; he made an early reputation in little magazines, decided to stop writing verse when still only 20, kept his silence for 20 years, then began again; and his first book of verse, published when he was 45, was his masterpiece La Jeune Parque. 'A poem should not mean, but be, ' said Archibald MacLeish. La Jeune Parque ('the goddess of Fate as a young woman') certainly exists: she's beautiful and makes great gestures. And as for what she means, there's a substantial amount of argument about that, so La Jeune Parque is a poem by either definition. It's a classic, by general agreement, written to the full 17th-century recipe for alexandrine couplets, and it's modern, with every word pulling its weight in more than one direction. Alistair Elliot's translation with notes is aimed at making this rewarding but difficult long poem accessible enough for bafflement to turn into admiration. He attempts to clarify its small puzzles and also trace the overall narrative line of Paul Valéry's poem: it does have a story (what should a young woman do?) and does struggle towards a resolution. He also provides an introduction which deals with the interesting circumstances of the poem's four-year composition (1913-17), which resulted in Valéry's instantly becoming a famous poet at the age of 45, after having written no poetry for 20 years.