ABSTRACT
Violence is a way of getting out of the poem, for instance in Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna", where the hero at the end jumps into the volcano. But emotions need their counterpoise, the way every action needs its equal and opposite reaction, and Paul Valery's structure answers the need. Music was the great art, Valery thought, but architecture in its purest state seemed more nearly complete because it had nothing left over. Prof. Rene Wellek, a seholar-cntic whose opinion is sometimes worth having, thought Valery's proposition more striking than true. Valery's poem is a tissue of words, not "the dress of thought" but the thought tout entier, and the poet must be alive to their whole lexical range. Valery was "the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century", T. S. Eliot said. Wallace Stevens in a noble passage from "Sunday Morning" speaks to Valery, one great spirit saluting another across cultures.
