Paul Valéry French (Corsican/Italian) Poet/Essayist/Aphoris Born: Sète, France on October 30, 1871. Died: Paris, France on July 20, 1945 at age 73. Location Interred: Cimetière Marin, Sète, Herault, France, with his parents, in a cemetary by the sea. --Biographical information from: http://www.littlebluelight.com

Paul Valéry was born on October 31, 1871 to Barthélémy Valéry, a customs clerk, and his wife Fanny in Sète, a small French coastal town on the Mediterranean. As a youth, Valéry often looked out on the sea and was hypnotized by its rhythm. This early appreciation of hypnotic rhythm would manifest itself in the rhythms of his poems.

In 1884, the Valéry's moved to nearby Montpellier. The same year, Valéry began to compose poetry at fairly rapid pace and was able to publish a few of his efforts before he was out of his teens. At school, however, Valéry was an unremarkable student who spent most of his time day dreaming. Valéry maintained a small circle of friends who shared his artistic passions and encouraged his writing.

During this formative period, Valéry admired such writers as Poe, Mallarme and other poets of the Symbolist movement who greatly influenced the style and direction of his own poetry. Mathematics and science also fascinated young Valéry because these disciplines exhibited the same beauty and mystery he had so enjoyed when looking at the sea as a child.

In 1884, Valéry enrolled in the university at Montpellier where he became an unremarkable law student for a year before embarking on his one year compulsory military service in 1889. During his service, Valéry was stationed at Montpellier and became acquainted with the writer Pierre Louÿs, who later introduced the young writer to some of his literary heroes, such as Andre Gide and Stephen Mallarme who both admired the young writer's early poetic efforts. With the help of Louÿs, Valéry began publishing his poetry in Symbolist journals to favorable reviews, but privately he viewed his artistic pursuits as a concession to his inability to pursue his interests in science and mathematics. Unfortunately, Valéry had a universalist mind and was so much interested in mastering the details of science, math, or even other artistic disciplines such architecture or music, as in investigating the relationships between these disciplines and how each expressed a different aspect of the human mind.

In 1892, after a frustrating failed love affair, Valéry renounced all interest in human passions. He focused solely on his scientific pursuits, giving up poetry because he felt it was entirely too emotional for his new, entirely rational frame of mind. The same year Valéry finished his law studies and moved to Paris, where already had a ready made group of friends due to his friendship with Mallarme and Gide. No longer writing poetry, Valéry began meditating for several hours each morning and recording his observations about science, language and consciousness in his private notebooks. He did freelance work for his first couple years in Paris and in 1895 published his first major work in the La Nouvelle Revue, 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo Da Vinci', in which he lauded Da Vinci, who was equally talented as an artist and scientist, as a prime example of his own universalist mind set: unemotional and master of several disciplines.

Valéry briefly worked in London for Cecil Rhodes in 1896, and published his first story about Monsieur Teste in Le Centaure, before returning to Paris in 1897 to begin a three stint as a clerk in the French War Ministry. On Tuesday, Valéry would attend a salon held at Mallarme's house where he mingled with the literary lights of Paris.

In 1900, Valéry became the private secretary of Edouard Lebey, news agency Agence Havas, where his only duties were to read the newspaper out loud to Lebey. The same year, he married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarme's News who was the niece of the prominent painter Berthe Morisot. He maintained his artistic friendships, but largely withdrew from the artistic world to focus on his scientific studies and raise his News, which would eventually include three children, Claude, Agathe, and François.

In 1912, nearly twenty years after he renounced poetry, his friend Gide coaxed Valéry into revising his early writings. When Valéry first faced his early poems, they revolted him, but through the process of revision, Valéry slowly regained his enjoyment of composition and began writing an entirely new poem which would become his masterpiece, 'The Young Fate'. After five years of labor, Valéry published the poem in 1917. It would take another three years of revisions before he published his collection of early poems in 1920. Valéry published a collection of new composed poems in 1922 under the title Charmes. Valéry soon gained widespread fame and secured his position as a nationally renowned poet. Unfortunately, the same year Charmes appeared, Lebey, Valéry's employer and benefactor who had allowed the poet ample time for his studies, died and left Valéry without employment. Valéry was forced to capitalize on his new found state and begin life as public intellectual, giving lectures and writing articles on the important topics of the day.

In the early twenties, Valéry began writing dialogues about many his aesthetic preoccupations, a literary form he would continue to utilize occasionally for the rest of his life. Valéry continued to publish bits of poetry for the next five years, but most of his work focused on various scientific, cultural, artistic and political matters that he was being paid to write about. Because of his abiding interest in science, Valéry personally knew most of the great scientists of his day, including Einstein and Faraday. Valéry also began publishing excerpts from his notebooks, many of which were pithy aphorisms about a wide range of topics from art and culture to politics and the foibles of human nature. Valéry was elected to the prestigious Academie Francaise in 1925. Because of his wit, he was popular guest at the best society functions. Due to the thorough knowledge of current events he gained while at the news agency, he also became a respected and sought after commentator on current events and world politics.

In 1926, he published a popular collection of humorous stories about Monsieur Teste, the overly intellectual character he had created several years before. In 1931, he collaborated with composer Arthur Honegger to develop an opera-ballet about Amphion, a character from Greek mythology who had the power to construct buildings using music. In 1933, Valéry was appointed chief administrator of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice and the College de France created the position of 'professor of poetry' for Valéry four years later.

In the early 1940's, Valéry turned his hand to play writing, producing two unfinished plays and a sketch for a play about Faust. Due to his international stature, Valéry was allowed to live a fairly congenial existence during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II. Paul Valéry died of heart trouble on July 20, 1945, shortly after the Allies liberated France. He was honored with a state funeral, which was attended by thousand. He is buried by the sea in his hometown of Sète with a tombstone that bears two lines from his poem Le Cimetière marin: "After a thought, O then what recompense/ A long gaze at the gods' serenity!"