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.