At the end of one of his most famous poems, Paul Valéry leaves a short appeal that continues to sound like a manifesto: “The wind is rising! We must try to live!“ Born on October 30, 1871 in the Mediterranean city of Sete, the French poet turns doubt, thought and the discipline of language into the main material of his poetry.
Valéry is the son of a Corsican and a woman of Italian origin. He studied in Montpellier, where he graduated in law, but from a young age he turned to literature. His first poems were published in 1889. At the beginning of his career, he fell into the circle of French symbolists and met Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide and Pierre Louis. Mallarmé's influence remained lasting, but Valéry gradually built his own poetics, in which form was not decoration, but a way of thinking.
Two decades almost without poems
In 1892, after a severe personal and spiritual crisis, Valéry withdrew from poetry. For years he dealt with mathematics, philosophy, language and the psychology of consciousness. He worked at the Ministry of War, and later became private secretary to Édouard Loebe, director of the “Avas“ agency.
The most important fruit of this period are his “Notebooks“ - daily notes in which he reflects on time, sleep, memory, language and the limits of human knowledge. Some of them were published after his death. For Valéry, writing is not a spontaneous outpouring of feelings, but a continuous work of the mind on words and their sound.
The return that makes him famous
André Gide encouraged him to return to poetry, and in 1917 Valéry published “The Young Park“ - a long poem, constructed with exceptional metrical and rhythmic precision. The work brought him wide fame. In 1920, “The Cemetery of the Sea“ was published, and two years later - the collection “Charms“, in which the poem is included.
The sea in his poetry is not just a landscape. It is a boundary between stillness and movement, between contemplation and action. In “The Cemetery of the Sea“ the sun, the graves and the waves become images of a consciousness that hesitates between the desire to remain in thought and the need to return to life. The final verse - – “The wind is rising! We must try to live!“ - is among the most recognizable lines in French poetry.
Poet, essayist and public intellectual
In 1925, Valéry was elected to the French Academy in place of Anatole France. In 1927, he delivered his acceptance speech without once mentioning the name of his predecessor - a gesture that remains among the most commented episodes in the history of the institution. In 1937, he took up the newly created chair of poetics at the Collège de France.
He wrote not only poetry, but also essays on art, science, architecture, dance and language. He was interested in Leonardo da Vinci, Bergson, Einstein and Louis de Broglie. During the German occupation, he refused to support collaboration with the Nazi regime, and after his speech in memory of the philosopher Henri Bergson, he lost his administrative post in Nice.
Paul Valéry died in Paris on 20 July 1945. He was buried in his native Sete, by the sea, which marked both the beginning and the end of his literary world. Today he is remembered as a poet of thought, but also as an author who proves that strict form can be not a limitation, but a path to freedom.
Sources: poetryfoundation.org, clereviewofbooks.com