Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli. Navigate; Linked Data; Dashboard; Tools / Extras; Stats; Share . Valéry in fact went so far as to donate money to aid the widow of Colonel Henry, who in 1898 killed himself when it became known that he had forged the documents used to incriminate Dreyfus. Paul Valéry. This first love probably had something to do with the intellectual and spiritual crisis of 1892 that caused him to renounce poetry for 20 years. Ego scriptor: Poèmes et petits poèmes abstraits. Valéry’s introduction to Gide, by Louis, began a friendship that lasted throughout Valéry’s life and that has been documented in Robert Mallet’s Self-Portraits: The Gide/Valéry Letters, 1890-1942. Trying to think of it one finds that all beginning is a consequence—every beginning completes something.”  Un grand calme m’écoute, où j’écoute l’espoir. This was not, in him, an excessive trait but rather a trained and transformed faculty. Experience has shown me that what I wanted most is not to be found in another—and cannot find the other capable of trying without reserve to go to the end of the will to ... take love where it has never been.” Neither the period of relative silence from 1892 to 1912 nor the resumption of a poetic vocation resolved this crisis, the dilemma of all Valéry’s life and work: he was never able to bring himself to embrace Lust, though at the end of his life he admitted that she was as integral to him as was the austere, argumentative, and intellectually prudish Faust. Examples of this are the sonnet ‘Cesar’ ... and the references in the Cahiers to the Emperor Tiberius, to Napoleon, and to Caesar. Paul Valéry $20.33. Algunos nombres destacados de su obra son: El Bosque Amigo, El Cementerio Marino, Encantamiento, Esbozo De Una Serpiente, Helena, y mas. Adicionar à coleção. Michel Philippon, Un souvenir d'enfance de Paul Valéry, éditions InterUniversitaires, 1996. This suspicion is also borne out by Valéry’s response to the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson during the German occupation of France during World War II; Valéry publicly admired Bergson but added that he could not accept Bergson’s belief that scientific knowledge was antithetical to the human spirit. According to Derrida, Valéry rejected psychoanalysis and metaphysics because they focused upon meaning, and for Valéry meaning was associated with the elevation of the physical, the sensual, over the formal properties of ‘pure’ intellect. Whom shall I kill? De sa grâce redoutable Voilant à peine l’éclat, Un ange met sur ma table Le pain tendre, le lait plat; Il me fait de la paupière Le signe d’une prière Qui parle à ma vision: -Calme, calme, reste calme! In his view, thought—the mirror-like refraction of the human mind—was always an end in itself; poetry was simply a more or less desirable by-product, to be pursued as long as it stimulated the mental processes. Paul Valéry suit les « mardis de Stéphane Mallarmé, Rue de Rome », séminaire qui a lieu au domicile du poète dont il restera l’un des plus fidèles disciples. Because his mother was Italian and his father was Corsican, Valéry was probably as comfortable speaking Italian as French. At first the narrator observes the calm sea under the blazing noontime sun and accepts the inevitability of death. Texte et poèmes / V / Paul Valéry / Le Cimetière marin. Si je regarde tout à coup n’a véri subir cette parole intérieure sans éphémères ; et cette infinité d’en facilité, qui se transforment l’un elles. La mejor poesía clásica en formato de texto. (Compiler and author of explanatory notes) Rene Descartes. Social. As Whiting explains, “Valéry planned a fourth act for ‘Lust’ which would have developed the love theme but he found the project too difficult for theatrical creation, perhaps in large part because of his own defensive attitudes. … Paul Valéry. Page destinée à partager les écrits de Paul Valéry, écrivain, poète et philosophe français, né à Sète le 30 octobre 1871, mort à Paris le 20 juillet 1945. Moralités (1932). Poemas famosos de Paul Valéry en español. L’abeille. Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes ; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée ! Fabien Vasseur commente La Jeune Parque, Poésies, Foliothèque, Gallimard, 2006. Poemes Paul Valéry - Découvrez les œuvres poétiques de Paul Valéry. charmes paul valery charmes valery poemes paul valery charmes poemes charmer alain paul valery verge commenter valery. For Valéry, as he reported in his Notebooks, “if a poet is allowed to use crude means, if a mosaic of images is a poem, then damn poetry.”  Derrida sees Valéry’s formalism as both reflection and instrument of his “repression” of meaning, and indeed, Valéry’s rigid adherence to classical prosody is another trait that sets him very much apart from other 20th-century French poets. One of his last works, a two-part dramatic work called “My Faust” (“Mon Faust”), attempted to deal with the issue and was never completed. Lista completa de versos y poemas de Paul Valéry. [Louis] is completely mute. Here the magical, musical spell of a beautiful evening brings Faust rapidly to a high point of pure enjoyment of being ...  ‘Lust’ ... attempts to synthesize extreme existence of mind and body with the extreme experience of love, even if in a very incomplete fashion. During a stormy and sleepless night, he decided that poetry was not the loftiest and purest expression of the mind’s activity. His fascination and personal identification with the Narcissus myth is well documented. 1. It contained the essay on Leonardo first published in 1895, the important article on Poe’s “Eureka,” and “Variations on a Thought” (“Variations sur une pensee”), in which he attacked Pascal as a thinker. Poesía. Poems are the property of their respective owners. “The cosmogonic form,” he wrote in his essay on “Eureka,” “comprises sacred books, admirable poems, excessively bizarre stories, full of beauty and nonsense, physico-mathematical researches of a profundity sometimes worthy of an object less insignificant than the universe. Le cimetière marin | Poème de Paul Valéry. En 1917, sous l’influence de Gide notamment, il revient à la poésie avec La Jeune Parque, publiée chez Gallimard. It represents a kind of chronicle in which the older poet seeks to recreate the intellectual crisis which led him to reject a nineteenth-century concept of poetry founded on an ethics of Symbolist idealism in favor of a poetry which claims autonomy through critical self-reference.” Speak then, with no fear of stating every lamentable word.” [Gide to Valéry, July 25, 1892] “Here is what he said about your poems—and don’t have me poisoned: ‘I’m surprised that with the tact and knowledge of poetry he sometimes shows, he leaves, here and there, some that would seem to me facile.’ The remark surprised me. Liste des citations de Paul Valéry sur amour classées par thématique. For me the name Narcissa suggested Narcissus. Here are his own words: ‘I gave up books twenty years ago. His family moved to Paris in 1851, where he was enrolled in the lycée. notes sur la grandeur et decadence de l/europe, p. 931 - Paul Valéry La supériorité comme cause de l'impuissance : être incapable d'une sottise qui peut être avantageuse. Yves Bonnefoy, who held Valéry’s chair in poetry at the College de France and succeeded him as the most prominent contemporary French poet, has said in L’Improbable that Valéry had no real influence on his own poetic development. On reading them, I imagined them published, but Mallarmé, when I saw him again, didn’t seem to think it desirable.” [Valéry to Gide, July 13, 1892] “[Louis] and You are beastly Semites: one of you, for having underhandedly and covered with a cloak of distance, dared to present my vague alchemies to Mallarmé, the other of you, for having dared even more, in not repeating to me textually the precious and pure panning I deserved from the Master. French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. During the years from 1892 to 1922, Valéry first worked as a bureaucrat in the French War Office and then as secretary to Edouard Lebey, director of the French Press Association; he attended the Tuesday evening gatherings of artists, writers, and intellectuals at the home of Mallarmé, and he married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarmé’s daughter. Paul Valéry Orphée... Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée. 2. And that’s about it.” Encantamiento. bibliotheque de la pleiade, 1960, chap. Valéry died on July 20, 1945, at the close of France’s last 20th-century war with Germany, having been born at the conclusion of its last 19th-century one. RETOUR: PERIODES: THEMES: AUTEURS: LIENS: 15eme Siècle: 16eme Siècle: 17eme Siècle: 18eme Siècle: 19eme Siècle: 20eme Siècle: Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years. Every morning he would get up at around five o’clock and write meditations, notes, and speculations in small volumes that he intended for no one but himself. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Valéry’s work and person, and certainly the one to which he himself would have attached greatest importance, was his cult of the intellectual self. 2 mil compartilhamentos. Valéry’s crisis occurred during an October, 1892 stay in Genoa, Italy. 370 compartilhamentos. Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. Among the celebrities who, along with Zola, took up Dreyfus’s case were Proust, the painter Claude Monet, and Anatole France. The dead girl’s name was Narcissa. Poesía de Paul Valéry Poemas de amor, de amistad, versos, poesía, poemas cortos de poetas del amor. Poèmes de cet auteur. In 1889 he read Joris Karl Huysmans’s novelistic manifesto of decadence, Against the Grain (A rebours), in which Mallarmé’s poem “Herodiade” is discussed admiringly, and the following year he met the young writers Pierre Louis and André Gide. Personne pure, ombre divine, In 1888, he passed the baccalaureat and entered law school, where literature first began to strike a responsive chord in him and he began to make contacts with the Parisian literary group surrounding Mallarmé. He was given a state funeral in Paris and buried at the cemetery at Sète, his birthplace and the setting for “The Seaside Cemetery.”  He was born the same year as Proust, the year of the Paris Commune and the Franco-Prussian War: 1871. Out of Stock. Retrouvez toutes les phrases célèbres de Paul Valéry parmi une sélection de + de 100 000 citations célèbres provenant d'ouvrages, d'interviews ou de discours. Regards sur le monde actuel. A uniquely curated, carefully authenticated and ever-changing assortment of uncommon art, jewelry, fashion accessories, collectibles, antiques & more. Critics have called Valéry the last French symbolist, the first post-symbolist, a masterful classical prosodist, and an advocate of logical positivism. La meilleure citation de Paul Valéry préférée des internautes. Poesia de Paul Valéry. Some facts about Valéry might predict a less than faultless comportment on Valéry’s part during World War II and France’s occupation by Germany: first, he had been quietly but strongly “anti-Dreyfusard” during the famous Dreyfus affair, in which Emile Zola and others accused the French army and government of anti-Semitism in making a scapegoat of Captain Alfred Dreyfus during his 1894 trial for treason. Achat Charmes - Poèmes Commentés Par Alain - 1/1010 Ex. A cahier written late in 1898 contains the following multilingual slogans: ‘Le Cesar de soi-meme / El Cesar de sumismo / Il Cesare di se stesso / The Cesar (sic) of himself.’” Furthermore, Valéry was also friendly with Marshal Philippe Petain, one of the leaders of France’s pro-German Vichy government. 0. In Margins of Philosophy Jacques Derrida has discussed Valéry’s aversion to Freud: “We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself. Of an early poem on this subject, “Narcissus Speaks” (“Narcisse Parle”), he wrote (quoted in volume I of Oeuvres [Works]): “The theme of Narcissus, which I have chosen, is a sort of poetic autobiography which requires a few explanations and indications. tristes lys, je languis de beauté Pour m’être désiré dans votre nudité, Et vers vous, Nymphes, Nymphes, ô Nymphes des fontaines Je viens au pur silence offrir mes larmes vaines. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science. Découvrez les poèmes de Paul Valéry, poète, philosophe et écrivain français né le 31/10/1871à Sète (France), décédé le 20/07/1945 à Paris (France). Poemas de Paul Valéry: El bosque amigo. Esbozo de una serpiente Helena. Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes ; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée That inscription had brought on reveries in me, and here, in two words, is its story. Les pas. Paul Valéry. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. Since Valéry castigated all such audience-directed writing, he clearly must have felt comfortable with Faust’s activities and motivations and anxious about Lust’s. Similar more or less debilitating infatuations symptomatic of Valéry’s extreme but repressed emotionalism and sensitivity occurred throughout his life. Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 10: History and Politics. à prix bas sur Rakuten. He also wrote and published The Evening With Monsieur Teste (La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste, 1896), in which he created the fictional character of Edouard Teste, a paragon of intellectual austerity and self-absorption, an “ideal” thinker, and therefore a role model for Valéry himself. Paul Valéry. In 1912, Valéry was persuaded to break his poetical fast by undertaking a major revision of his earlier poems, which would be published under the title Album of Old Verses (Album de vers anciens) in 1920. Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. Connais le poids d’une palme Portant sa profusion! Valéry would publish four more volumes of Variety in his lifetime. He was never mistaken. Never was he mistaken—not led instinctively—but lucidly and successfully, he made a synthesis of all the vertigoes.”  Valéry’s passion for “scientific speculation,” which is how he preferred to label his metaphysical writing and that of others, was the reason for his lifelong fascination with American writer Edgar Allan Poe. French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. Corriger le poème. Paul Valéry (1871-1945), French poet, essayist. A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations. Whiting’s brief account of the play may thus help explain Valéry’s 20-year refusal to embrace poetry as a career: “Before Faust’s conclusion by exhaustion of possibilities, liberation, and death, there is in ‘Lust’ a remarkable apotheosis of life in the garden-scene of the second act. El cementerio marino. The exigencies of a strict prosody are the artifice which confers upon natural language the qualities of a resistant matter.”  Adicionar à coleção. UCLA Library. 1K likes. In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry’s verse, the influence of Mallarmé is unmistakable. Yet his reasons for remaining faithful to form—more so, in many instances, than Baudelaire and Mallarmé who were formalists but innovative ones—were much more interesting than a mindless traditionalism. Œuvres ii, paul valery, édition gallimard, coll. For Mallarmé, as for his younger disciple, Idea was not a theme that could be formulated in a sentence or two; it was not a thought but rather the ongoing process of thought within the mind. ... L’Amateur de poèmes. If I knew [Gide’s friend, writer Maurice] Quillot better, I should have you poisoned. In 1922, Édouard Lebey, Valéry’s employer at the French Press Association, died, and the necessity of finding a new source of income further confirmed his revived sense of a literary—a publicly literary—vocation. For me, the self ...  Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise.” Responding to 17th-century poet and critic Nicolas Boileau’s time-honored dictum that “my verse, good or bad, always says something,” Valéry asserted in the Notebooks, “There is the principle and the germ of an infinity of horrors.” From then until 1912, he wrote little poetry, instead devoting most of his creative energies to the Notebooks. The French poet, Symbolist leader, and Decadent Paul-Marie Verlaine was born in Metz, Northeast France on March 30, 1844. In 1892, Valéry completed work on his law degree and embarked upon an unrequited and, by his own admission, “ludicrous” love affair. Therefore every literary product is an impure product.” The relative purity of Mallarmé, “the Master,” as Valéry called him, was thus entirely congruent with and dependent on both Mallarmé’s total disregard for—indeed, ignorance of—the public taste and his consequent obscurity (no one outside of a very small Parisian circle had read his poems or knew of his existence until well into the twentieth century). Michel Philippon, Paul Valéry, une poétique en poèmes, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1993. I keep what I want.’”. Valéry passed on an important legacy of influence in American letters, perhaps much greater than his influence on later French poets. Los pasos ( otra versión) . O número dos nossos inimigos varia na proporção do crescimento da nossa importância. By 1920, Valéry had already published The Young Fate, a long, very difficult poem, to great critical and popular acclaim. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945) : De la mer océane - Le bar à poèmes Already in the first act, Faust tells Mephistopheles that he wants only tenderness, not love, from Lust ...  Love is a danger because [it is] so closely related to instincts, to the cyclical and repetitive functions of life ...  And so the intimacy of Lust and Faust is only a fleeting moment in the second act, and the too difficult fourth act was never written.”  Sur Vergé. Yet although Mallarmé believed that the end product of thought had to be a poem, Valéry disagreed. Toute la poésie française du 20ème siècle: Paul Valéry. Le Sylphe. Retrouvez toutes les phrases célèbres de Paul Valéry parmi une sélection de + de 100 000 citations célèbres provenant d'ouvrages, d'interviews ou de discours. This girl, who died in Montpellier toward the end of the eighteenth century, couldn’t be buried in the cemetery, since she was a Protestant. Furthermore, Freud offered the obvious explanation of why Valéry might so vociferously vilify a belief in and search for meaning: the mind’s repressed contents are always sexual. What Valéry admired so much in Teste was that, as The Evening With Monsieur Teste reveals, he had “killed his puppet.” That is, he did nothing conventional, “never smiled, nor said good morning or good night ... seemed not to hear a ‘How are you?’’ In “Letter From Madame Emilie Teste” (“Lettre de Madame Emilie Teste”), Valéry’s narrator imagined in him “incomparable intellectual gymnastics. A corollary of these convictions was the idea that no pure literature was possible as long as the writer thought of himself as addressing a public. Faust addresses her as ‘tu’ and there is a brief moment of emotional communion with a birth of intimacy and tenderness, those beginnings of love which Valéry prized above all other joys. He attended school at the College de Sète, now renamed in his honor, and at the lycée of the nearby city of Montpellier. All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge... Paul Valéry, French poet, essayist, and critic was born in Sète, France in 1871. La meilleure citation de Paul Valéry préférée des internautes. In The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Julian Symons has described Poe as divided between two obsessive tendencies in his writings, a visionary one and a logical one. Valéry himself wrote in his Notebooks that “Lust and Faust are me—and nothing but me. Almost from the beginning of the garden-scene Lust shows her love for Faust, and immediately after Faust’s great monologue, she unconsciously places her hand upon his shoulder. It was rather the sense of my own identity, of a sameness within vast, elusive differences.” It may be in the enduring classicism of Southern letters, passed from Tate to such contemporary Southern writers as Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, and James Applewhite, that Valéry’s voice, through the veil of translation, can be heard most clearly today. All the rest is literature. Ver imagem. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) occupies a key place in French poetry, summing up the charm and technique of the nineteenth century while looking ahead to the psychological preoccupations of the twentieth. L’Amateur de poèmes. Poème Le Cimetière marin. He criticized French novelist Marcel Proust for this very tendency, though in doing so he misread Proust. However, the American poet Allen Tate, a well-known member of the Southern Agrarian movement that flourished particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, has recorded in his Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 that “Here, in [Valéry’s] ‘Pages Inedites’ [‘Unpublished Pages’], was a man educated in the French classical tradition and fired imaginatively by his early entretiens with Mallarmé: whose apparently casual utterances gave me something more than the shock of recognition. In a rather secluded corner of this garden, which formerly was much wilder and prettier, there is an arch and in it a kind of crevice containing a slab of marble, which bears three words: PLACANDIS NARCISSAE MANIBUS (to placate the spirit of Narcissa). We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. As before, to get a rendering as free from interpretation as possible, we feed the text into an online (machine code) translator. In the face of such statements, Valéry’s scorn for the mystical may seem incongruous, but this attitude is nevertheless a prominent feature of his thought, evident most of all in his contempt for the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 13: Aesthetics. Whereas you merely hint. As Charles G. Whiting has written in Paul Valéry, “The unfinished play ‘Lust’ ... remains as a testimony of his longing for a perfect communion he never found.” In “Lust” and “The Solitary” (“Le Solitaire”), which together comprise “My Faust,” one finds the most frank treatment by Valéry of his profound fear of sensuality. He took up poetry again, of course, but even as an old man he would continue to be profoundly troubled by what he regarded as the unsolvable equation of love. He continued writing his Notebooks and began to publish essays—Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (Introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vinci), and his inquiry into dreams, Studies (Etudes). Teste might be thought of as a precursor of the figure Faust, but without the opposing figure of Lust. There exists in Montpellier a botanical garden where I used to go very often when I was nineteen. O frères ! The Graveyard by the Sea, poem by Paul Valéry, written in French as “Le Cimetière marin” and published in 1922 in the collection Charmes; ou poèmes.The poem, set in the cemetery at Sète (where Valéry himself is now buried), is a meditation on death. It was the former, editor of a small literary magazine called La Conque, who first showed Valéry’s work to Mallarmé and got several of his early poems into print, including “Narcissus Speaks.”  His fear of sensuality may also explain his violent intellectual prejudices—against Freud, for instance, or against philosophy. Tous les poèmes et textes par ordre alphabétique. “Lust” allegorizes this profound conflict, never resolved by Valéry. It seems then that the history of the mind can be resumed in these terms: it is absurd by what it seeks, great by what it finds ...  As for the idea of a beginning,—I mean of an absolute beginning—it is necessarily a myth. These views need not be contradictory. He followed the Album of Old Verses with Charms (“songs” or “incantations”) in 1922, and had written his first quasi-Platonic dialogues, Eupalinos; or, The Architect (Eupalinos; ou, L`architecte) and The Soul and the Dance (L’Ame et la danse) in 1921. And this, very important.” But Valéry also declared: “For him: the work. Paul Valéry. Incohérente sans le paraîtr Despite Mallarmé’s reservations, several of the poems were published. As he put it in his Notebooks, “In sum, Mallarmé and I, this in common—poem is problem. All joking apart, you are loathsome. Ode secrète. In 1937 Valéry was appointed to the new chair in poetry at the College de France, a position he held until his death in 1945. Services . In 1924, Variety (Variété), a collection of his essays, appeared. The role of the nonexistent exists; the function of the imaginary is real; and pure logic teaches us that the false implies the true. “Narcissus Speaks” was immediately celebrated by the Paris literary establishment and selected by Adolphe Van Bever and Paul Leautaud for their important anthology Poets of Today (Poetes d’aujourd’hui). However, the poet did prove sympathetic to the Free French Movement led by General Charles de Gaulle, and of the Nazis he wrote in “War Economy for the Mind”: “As for our enemies, we, and the whole world, know that their politics with regard to the mind has been reduced or limited for ten years to repressing the developments of intelligence, to depreciating the value of pure research, to taking often atrocious measures against those who consecrated themselves to these things, to favoring, even as far as endowed chairs and laboratories, worshippers of the idol to the detriment of independent creators of spiritual richness, and they have imposed on the arts as on the sciences the utilitarian ends which a power founded on declamations and terror pursues.” Moreover, his praise of Bergson was regarded as a courageous act. 14, "Analects," ed. Find unreal value with everything starting at $1. This “dictation of memoirs” appears to represent Valéry’s own intellectual narcissism, the self-directed literary activity of the Notebooks; Lust with her other-directed emotion seems to symbolize poetry that is meant to be read. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Immediately, however, Faust retreats, and the apotheosis of the garden-scene comes to an end as he turns again to the dictation of his memoirs.”  {5} Texts: And problems: His preoccupation with the intellectual superman had led him to a great interest in the man wielding extreme power, the dictator, the tyrant. Paul Valéry. Pour autant qu’elle se plie À l’abondance des biens, Sa figure est accomplie, Ses fruits lourds sont ses liens. Air de Sémiramis. I wrote at the time the very first Narcissus, an irregular sonnet ... ”  Le Bois Amical. The remains that had been found were identified as hers. The former dialogue treats much the same topics as “The Seaside Cemetery” (“Le Cimetiere marin”), probably Valéry’s best-known poem: the relationships of life and death, light and darkness, movement and stasis, which compose life itself. Mallarmé’s ambiguously positive response to Valéry’s early work was reported by Gide: [Gide to Valéry, July 12, 1892] “My friend, Mallarmé has given me your poems; since he criticized them, he must esteem them. In 1820, at this place, a skeleton was discovered, and according to local traditions, it was thought to be the tomb of the poet [Edward] Young. Mail His recurrent, even obsessive, denigration of Pascal may reflect Valéry’s fear that his own distinction between science and metaphysics, rationalism and mysticism, might not hold up, that in fact—as is so evident in Valéry’s own “scientific” musings—there might be some mutual contamination of the categories.