Paul Valery

All of which throws light on the myth of a Valery cast in the image of his programmatic hero of the pure mind, Monsieur Teste: a myth conceived by the youthful idealist who launched the “System”, later re-essentialized and popularized by Breton, to whom the icon of a reserved and self-enfolding intellectual potency was singularly fascinating. We learn here, too, that Teste’s creator himself often “mythifies” the recurrent crises that punctuated his career, in proportion as they are dynamic or foundational (the famous “secular conversion” of the “Nuit de Genes” is a case in point). Such glimpses of the mythic dimension of the poet’s rationality will further undermine the cliché of Valery’s “intellectualism”. --Paul Gifford, The ultimate French intellectual? The Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 2009, review of Paul Valery, by Michel Jarrety (via Arts & Letters Daily)


Recommended reading:
by Paul Valery at Reading Rat


The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery, by Joseph Epstein, The New Criterion, March 2003