Includes some of Valéry's finest strokes of imagination, Broken Stories; some of his wittiest observations, Mixtures, Poems in the Rough; and even two of his great poems, Parables and The Angel—all written in the form of prose. Originally published in 1970. 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.

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.

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.

'sense too definite cancels your indistinct literature' Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry - in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and discontinuity. This is the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poetry ever published in English, and the only edition in any language that presents his Poésies in the last arrangement known to have been approved by the author. Apart from verse, it includes all the prose poems and the unique, unclassifiable Un Coup de dés... (A Dice Throw...). The lucid, wide-ranging introduction and invaluable notes help an understanding of this astonishing poet's work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.