ABSTRACT
Of mixed Italian and Corsican blood, Vale´ry
was born in Se`te, a Mediterranean port
which was to inform his whole imaginary
world as a poet. Already by the age of nine-
teen he had written between two and three
hundred poems, was engaged in painting and
fascinated by music (in particular that of
Wagner) and architecture. Then, as a law
student at the University of Montpellier, he
added mathematics and physics to his interests.
Moving to Paris he continued to write poetry
until 1892, assiduously frequenting the milieu
of the Symbolists, who, with Mallarme´ as
their focal point, sought to make poetry as
pure, abstract and evocative as music. In his
late teens Vale´ry also came under the spell of
the aesthetic theories of Edgar Allan Poe,
according to which the poet must always be
aiming at the effect that he is going to create
on the reader. But neither Poe nor the
Symbolists offered Vale´ry a satisfactory
account of the world of the emotions, and it
became his credo that the intellect should take
control. Giving up poetry he decided to
devote himself to a rigorous exploration of the
way in which ‘the closed system that is the
mind’ functions.