ABSTRACT
Catherine Pozzi is unjustly remembered more for her tumultuous liaison with Paul Valery than for her exalted story Agnes, her philosophical essay Peau d’ame and especially her love and metaphysical poems, first published after her death simply as Poemes. The poem “Ave” alone should assure a lofty place for Pozzi in the history of French poetry. Like the sixteenth-century poets whom she studied closely, Pozzi sets elevated amorous sentiments against a philosophical backdrop. Like much of Pozzi’s verse, “Vale” exhibits strange punctuation and some tantalizingly obscure passages that nonetheless possess philosophical resonance. Pozzi often links the soaring effusions of love with a heavenly firmament contemplated in all its metaphorical richness. Pozzi often envisaged corporeal extinction as a stage beyond which her soul not only persisted, but enabled her to escape, like a Hindu or a Buddhist with respect to karma, an endless cycle of reincarnation, memory, and suffering.
