Paul Valéry: a poet of intellectual sensibility

Abstract: The essay is focused on the poetics of the French poet Paul Valéry – ‘the last child of symbolism’, as the critics will call him. Valéry is the successor in the intellectual current in the development of modern poetry and the most zealous inheritor of the great Master of European symbolism – Stéphane Mallarmé. This study reflects on Valéry’s avant-garde in the context of European poetry at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, analysing the symbiosis between the past and the neo-symbolist tendencies in his artistic methods, as well as the idea of ​​the verse as a monument to a reflexive recreation of the image of the world. The interpretative viewpoint explains the ideas of the Poet as a being engaged in intellectual quests, the aesthetic subjectivism of intellectual verse, the idea of ​​the purity of poetic language, the ‘perfect form’, as well as the cult of ‘absolute poetry’, or poetry understood as a creation in the highest aesthetic function of language – an idea whose insightful advocate was precisely this poet.

Keywords: Paul Valéry, neosymbolism, modernism, ‘absolute poetry’, aesthetics

– Ô ma mère Intelligence
P. Valéry, ‘Poèsie’[1]
 

1. The avant-garde of Valéry: An eternity between heritage and innovation

Is one of the poet’s most precious dreams – the dream of the perfect poem perceived as a little world that becomes a house where the very Infinity can be found, even conceivable and possible? Is it possible for the dream to capture the reflection of the absolute being of the Spirit as an Idea that reveals the Infinitive within itself, in the mirror and in the gleaming fountain of language? Can the pendulum of the poem – that has been theoretically suggested by Paul Valéry – manifest the poet’s dream, when, in its harmonious journey between ontological opposites, it brings into correspondence the spheres of Reason and Sentiment, the realms of Thought and Voice, the realms of the external world and the internal, unknown world? ‘My aesthetics is purely intellectualistic. For my part, I believe in the essential unity of the mind, whether it be a question of intellection or of creation’ (Valéry 1975: 346) –Valéry notes, reflecting on the nature of his own creative modus operandi.

Paul Valéry (Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry, 1871–1945), with his advent at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, will be designated as the ‘last child’ of symbolism, but also as the most zealous inheritor of Stéphane Mallarmé. This poet experienced poetry as a dictate of a magical and enigmatic dream in the perception of the intellectual being of beauty. Nonetheless, Valéry did not conceive poetry as the outcome of a miracle or as a consequence of a blissful emotional ecstasy echoing Wordsworth’s conception of the creation of verse, nor did this poet always invoke Plato’s interpretation of the poetic enthusiastic μανíα (mania)[2]. He believed that poetry can only be an intellectualised exaltation, an intellectualised enchantment with the imperative of Thought that is seeking itself in its own wellspring of language. Poetry requires a fervent devotion to the Spirit, an act in which some stars in the poet’s being always fade away, that is to say – they experience mortal ecstasy in the name of the birth of the absolute beauty of the grandiose and sublime cosmos of the Thought. Arguing for the nature of modern art, Charles Baudelaire, as the ‘father of modern poetry’, in his essay ‘Modernity’ (‘La modernié’), described the aesthetic phenomenon of modernity as ‘the ephemeral, evanescent, contingent half of art, whose other part is eternal and unalterable’ (Baudelaire 1925: 66). Modernity, for Baudelaire, is that which in art, according to the aesthetic axiology of an epoch, is instantaneous and fleeting, while its metaphysical quintessence, as a matter of fact, hides the seal of the promise of Eternity – which conquers Time.

Furthermore, Arthur Rimbaud in A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer, 1873), warned that the artist must always be ‘absolutely modern’ (Rimbaud 1900: 200). Rimbaud suggests that modernity should be considered as a principle that travels through time and inherently epitomises the key to the everlasting life in a work of art. With whose aesthetic viewpoints can the creative personality of Paul Valéry be most closely correlated? Valéry, undeniably, synthesises both theoretical currents within himself – as a poet who is eternally ‘absolutely modern’, and in whose art of verse, a mark of equilibrium has imposed itself between modernity and eternity.

For the secret that the artist has concealed within a work of art to shine through, that work of art must first become a palimpsest of time, contextualisation and meanings. That being the case, what is modern and avant-garde about Paul Valéry’s artistic appearance? His modernity is actualised precisely in the poietic power to recognise the renewable, that which in the literary and spiritual heritage of the creative genius of humanity pulsates with a half-extinguished glow, and to scatter upon it the light of the spirit of the new age of the creative force of the poetic mind.

Valéry emphasises that the poet must not be uncritical towards his creative methods and ‘must not aim at originality, particularly in our time’ because very often the ‘result is that what was original in the morning is copied the same evening’ (Valéry 1985: 182). The fact that in his poetics of pure intellectual lyrical reflection, Paul Valéry, in formal and stylistic syncresis, will reactualize and revive the ideals of the dignified, strict classicism and the mystical contemplation of the being of the world as an aesthetic attitude inherent in symbolism, as well as the Parnassian idealisation of the perfect poetic form and the perception of the world as an artistic experience per se – does not resonate as a form of artistic epigonism. On the contrary. Paul Valéry masters the poetic dialogue with the past in an aesthetic act with a remarkably solemn lyrical gracefulness and intellectual mystical freshness.

1. Poetics of intellectual enchantments

It is an essential axiom that poets are beings who dream of the Impossible, and therefore, amazingly, the ideal of the Impossible becomes the only possible and real. Valéry was conscious of this axiom. With his artistic gift of erudition and prudence (similar to the image of Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he felt a congenial affinity) in his insight into the phenomenology of reality, which in him is expressed in a pure artistic brilliance of the Intellect, Valéry steps forward as a unique successor in the intellectual creative line of Mallarmé – the uncontested Le Maître of French symbolism.

The relationship between Valéry and Mallarmé was particularly mystically noble. Valéry recognised in this poet a faithful Master, but also an intellectual father figure. It is no coincidence that it was exactly in his early youth, amidst the trials of profound intellectual metamorphosis, as Valéry himself recalls, that André Gide would introduce him precisely to Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s verses will be an occasion for intellectual and artistic amazement for Valéry’s young mind. The admiration and amazement towards his personality, due to which Valéry would abandon many of his previous personal and creative paradigms in literature, would, fundamentally, be the first impulse for this poet to dare to dream of the ideal of sublime poetic perfection.

Valéry defines poetic discourse as a complex and very delicate equilibrium that arises between the currents of intellectual and emotional energy in language. The verse, in its meticulous noetic appearance, is in a sensitive quest for the perfect euphonic thread of reconciliation between the currents of sentiment and ratio. Valéry’s poetics, operating with the logos of the intellect, disavows the intuitiveness of classical romanticism. Valéry is a poet who stands upright before the altar of the Intelligence. Poetic language is a delicate mechanism in which the ‘pendulum’ of Harmony oscillates between absence and presence, between sound and meaning, between impression and expression – as the poet himself reflects in the essay ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (‘Poésie et Pensée abstraite’, 1939). The pendulum of poetic harmony manifests the genesis of the poem as a dialectical encounter of reconciling opposites. The cosmogenesis of the poem is a sublime, majestic liturgical act of demiurgic recreation of the word, its ontologization on an aesthetic level, when language, understood as ‘an instrument, a tool’ (Valéry 1985: 200), becomes a reflection of a ‘poetic state of mind by means of words’ (ibid. 79), when language is exalted as a construction of emotional and intellectualised geometry of poetic image and thought, where the sonorous, prosodic and imagistic elements suggest a unique aesthetic riddle. Ecstatic pathos, romantic and sentimental adventures are not inherent to Valéry’s sensibility, and, therefore, his poietic intention is always orchestrated by the imperative of poetic techne. In contrast to Jean Paul’s romantic concept of Weltschmerz (‘world-pain’), Valéry feels the cosmic beauty of the material world, which is transfigured into a spiritual one within the being of the verse. Valéry’s hermeticism sets itself the task of creating a semantic and syntactic mysterious complexity of language. Mallarmé’s ‘pure poetry’ (la poésie pure) is poetry that expresses itself in ‘pure (not personal) subjectivity, whose home is not the world, but the verbal expanse and dream’ (Фридрих 2010: 229–230). Bringing it into line with Hegel’s dialectical concept, Hans-Georg Gadamer notes that in Mallarmé’s poetry, ‘the most precious are the images’ in which, in a metaphysically cathartic synthesis, ‘words connect with each other as an encounter between the Nothingness and the call of the Absolute’ (Gadamer 2002: 32). Valéry complements this cult, inaugurating the imperative of the ‘absolute poetry’, which, according to his theoretical vision, should be understood ‘in the sense of a search for the effects resulting from the relations between words, or rather the relations of the overtones of words among themselves, which suggests, in short, an exploration of that whole domain of sensibility which is governed by language’ (Valéry 1985: 186). Hugo Friedrich discovers Valéry’s verses, in their idiosyncrasy of ‘resolute nihilism regarding knowledge’ (Фридрих 2010: 229). The meanings are locked and their echoes are scattered in the endless horizons of polysemic hermeticism[3]. Words should be semanticized to the point of ecstasy of the intellectual and artistic estrangement, alienated from their referential, denotative role, and transformed into an ‘enigma’, an ‘abys’, into ‘a torment of thought’ (Valéry 1985: 55), when poetry, in fact, becomes a ‘language within a language’ – premises that undoubtedly affirm from afar, the symbolist conceptions of Jean Moréas.[4]

Poetry is the art of language per se, a voyage into the unknown and into the deepest layers of expression where linguistic and semantic combinatorics generate emotion, sentimental intonation and Idea, as a construct equivalent to a mathematical formula[5]. Poetry is the extraction of a pure, noetic ideal; the genesis of the sacred symmetry of thought and feeling as a reflection of the immortal Spirit. In poetry, the Idea differentiates the cosmos from chaos, being from non-being; poetry arises in the transformation of absence into presence. The Idea is the arche of the cosmogenesis of the poem. The poet is only a magical instrument through which the Idea is articulated. But what would the Idea be without its Demiurge? Just a voice condemned to wander in its echo sunk in lifeless darkness. Developing a dialogue with the well-known symbolist concepts, Valéry postulates the Idea in a neo-symbolist paradigm. Consequently, the Idea as a secret is the very being of the Poet, and the Poet is the very being of the Idea. They are masters of each other. The Idea is the existential arche of the Word. The poet recognises the Idea in its enigmatic, unknowable, autotelic nature of a Logos perfect in itself. That is why poetry is the absolute entelechy of language. Language, through ‘cleaning up the verbal situation’ (Valéry 1985: 54), exists only to become poetry, only to recognise itself in the mysterious ontology of the poem. If philosophy, for Valéry, ‘is the art of making a system of everything that enters the mind’ (Valéry 1975: 322), then poetry is a harmonious transfiguration of ontological disorder into a noetic and melodious cosmic order of language, which awakens the sentiment of the aesthetic being of reality.

Being, according to Friedrich Hölderlin, inhabits the world poetically, and therefore, the statement that ‘all the reflective thinking is singing, and all poetry is – thinking’ (Hajdeger 1982: 248) – suggested by Martin Heidegger – also strongly affirms Valéry’s understanding of poetry, for whom poetic transposition of reality through the bright crystal of language is an incantational metamorphosis of the world into the flash of intellectual magic of the mystery of the Spirit. The whole reality finds sanctuary in the being, in the ‘house’ of the poem as a structure that perceives only verbal, linguistic existence. Language for Valéry is an epiphanic phenomenon. Poetic language is the Purgatory of the world. Thinking in Kant’s language, poetry can be understood as a pure intellectual yearning for the world to contemplate itself in the noumenological essence of the mysterious monad of the poem. The poet, like Narcissus, must reflect himself in the pure wellspring, in the bright mirror of language, and in that reflection discover, at least for a moment, the most invisible essence of the Spirit, as the pleading desire resounds in Valéry’s Fragments of the Narcissus (Fragments du Narcisse):

Dream, dream of me!... But for you, lovely founts,
My beauty, my sorrow, would be uncertain to me.
I would search in vain for what I have most dear
(Valéry 1971: 141)

Immortalised in the infinitely deep source of language, the being becomes a reflection, a shadow of the essence and of the Spirit. The poet, just like Narcissus, looking in that mirror that divides the world, discovers his own twin, he discovers a reflection of his essence, immortalised in the spiritualised silence of the sacred act of singing, and therefore, that reflection becomes an unattainable double who remains distant and mysterious. The reflection that lives in the ontological realm of language and dream is intangible in its fragility. The double of the Being on the shining surface of the wellspring of the poem is silent, and the poet knows that this apparition will never be able to invite him beyond the threshold of reality, when the spirit becomes an echo of the absolute and the impossible for the creative dream.

Valéry is a symphonist of intelligent verse. The being, for this poet is ‘Universal Ear’ (Valéry 1971: 113), as he suggests in the poem ‘Dawn’ (‘Aurore’). Through a long-mastered technique, Valéry learned how to orchestrate the music of speech, how to become sufficiently sensitive to the synesthetic resonance of language, and therefore he remembers: ‘The words I heard touched off in me some kind of harmonic relations and the hidden presence of imminent rhythms. Syllables took on colour’ (Valéry 1985: 133), suggesting that poetic language is a phenomenon of neoclassical harmonisation between music and mathematics as manifestation of the pure idea of ​​beauty[6]. Valéry emphasizes the differentiation between poetic language as language in an aesthetic function (in theoretical dialogue with Roman Jakobson), as opposed to language as a referential organon. He proposes his belief that a word that sounds almost insignificant when used in non-literary, quotidian speech, is being transformed when it is used in the discursive disposition of the poetic message.

In poetry, language becomes sacralized. Poetic language for Valéry is mysterious, it is an autotelic language that does not denote or nominate, but a language that suggests and evokes. This conviction echoes Mallarmé’s observation according to which – the simple act of naming the object of reality destroys ‘the joy of the poem which consists in revealing itself step by step: to suggest – that is the dream’ (Mallarmé 1945: 869). This affirms that the mystery of the poem consists in the gradual evocation of the object and the symbol behind it, which reveals a whole ‘state of the soul’[7] (ibid.) Therefore, Valéry reaches for his great Master’s dream – The Impossible Work. The verses are not the result of sentimental ecstasies, but the fruit of a contemplative artistic technique. Poetry is created with words, not with ideas –Mallarmé once, with an ironic and didactic solemnity, warned the inconsolably disappointed Edgar Degas. Not without reason, Valéry will also agree in a similar affirmation, and in The Lover of Poems he will note: ‘I surrender to the divine rhythm: reading, living where the words may lead. As they appear, they are written down. Their sonorities are harmonised’ (Valéry 1971: 63). The language of poetry as a telos itself implies a melic immanence, a phonetic and contemplative quality that is actualised in the rhythm of associations. Valéry’s lyrical style brings a refined expression of the crystalline limpidity of metaphor, but it is an expression that at the same time is locked in its invincible hermeticism interwoven with a deep sonority that invokes Verlaine’s musical phrase, or the sublime delicacy of Claude Debussy and the cathartic lyricism of Willibald Gluck, which deepens in symbiosis with the spirit of classical versification and prosody taken from the strict and solid force of Jean Racine’s verse.

The manner of harmonising opposites is distinctive for Valéry, whose verse, Hugo Friedrich notes, is ‘a spiritual act transformed into a poem, where the intellectuality and sensitivity, clarity and mystery interfere in harmony’ (Фридрих 2010: 232). Through this harmony Valéry performs his ‘negative philosophy’. It is a question of a perpetuating palingenesis of presence and absence in the lyrical cosmos. Apparently, beauty for Valéry is abnegation because it is unattainable, never finally knowable; the poetic ideal of beauty always generates contradictory phenomena of wordlessness and silence. Hence, Valéry, echoing Mallarmé’s dream of the absolute in language, admits that beauty is a transcendent ideal that leads even to spiritual despair precisely because it is never fully achievable. He writes that ‘the most beautiful thoughts are shadows’ (Valéry 1985: 11). How can the poet entice those shadows in order to immortalize them in the perfect alabaster of the poem? Valéry’s slogan: ‘Le Beau est négatif’ – is an evident actualisation of his modernist sensibility, which is also analogous to Theodor Adorno’s thesis, according to which the category of beauty can be determined only negatively. Beauty is something that transcends definition itself, something that is incomprehensible, and that cannot be reduced to a simple lexical and logical implication. Valéry considers the poem as a perfectly created fragment of an almost mythical and spiritual realm. Hence, the verses are an incantation, a celebration of the dream of the impossible and unreachable – that which can only have a verbally ontologised existence, and which the poet can only conquer as a shadow of the Ideal and the Absolute, only as a fragment of the world that remains unknown as a mirror of the longing of the pure Spirit. Valéry enigmatically argues that there cannot be a more mysterious category than the non-existent. In this category, there floats a dimension of the dream of the Unknown, or, the shadow of the Unknown, of the Unreachable, of Silence – as negatively determined qualities in the actualisation of the perfect poem. The category of the non-existent is the arche-Absolute of the sublimity in its filled emptiness, in its reflective musicalized silence of the cosmos of the infinite in the beings of the Idea and the Symbol, which is again an echo of the reflections of the great Master Mallarmé. Both Mallarmé and Valéry are poets of quests without promises, of quests for the elusive, of quests for the metaphysical Ouroboros of the undefinable and nameless ocean of silence and the music of verse.

The phenomenon of negative philosophy is reflected in the contemplative confrontation with absence, emptiness and silence. Valéry, in the creative adventures of thought that verbalises, strives to actualise the state of pure, solid and brilliant verse. One of the core aspects of Valéry’s poetry is the objectification of abstract, sensory-imperceptible, intelligible questions of Spirit and Mind. Valéry’s poetic language celebrates the striving for the absolute invincibility of the Idea, that dimension of existence that is linguistically indescribable for poetic discourse. The dazzling glow of summer, the azure vaults of sky, the seashores, the mythical wonderlands, the nocturnal landscape dreams – all these images and motifs are projected through poetic singing eyes that intellectualise them, while the keys to esoteric meanings are hidden in their mystified aura. Valéry’s symbolic eidology transforms reality into a world of hymnic images full of brilliant azure radiance and mystical sea light, images full of the whisper of palm leaves and the sound of the sea, where the lyrical subject is most often contemplative and puzzling. That is the Soul, the Mind, or, an unconscious, translucent being of Thought observed somewhere between the realms of dream and the frozen moment of aestheticized reality, whose consciousness and impressions dissolve in the sacred and illuminated metaphysics of lyrical singing. The cosmogenesis of the poem’s being begins from the negative, but promising presence, from absence, from ‘every atom of silence’ (Valéry 1971: 233), as arche-atoms that should ripen into ‘fruits’, as it is suggested in the poem ‘Palm’ (‘Palme’). Indeed, the poem arises as a fruit of the music of language. In the 1917 poem ‘Summer Stars’ by Boris Pasternak, this wonderful line whispers: ‘Silence, you are the most beautiful / of all I have ever heard’ (Пастернак 1965: 125). In the same impressionism, by all means, Valéry’s lyrical subject experiences silence. His lyrical subject is predetermined by the halo of the allusive hermeticism, arising in an intellectual vigil in which thought unlocks the metaphysical chronotope of the world. The lyrical object in the poetic symphonic universe passes through the strict mechanism of the imperative of pure intellect, being essentialised to the purest idea of itself.

The poet mystifies the world hidden in the poetic image in such a way that the world inside is observed through a luminous, crystallised curtain that reveals the oneirically introspective landscapes of the spirit and nature articulated through the language of Thought. In the interference between the classicist tendency of the perfect poetic form and the neo-symbolist nature of the poetic image – amalgamated into a unique neo-classicist modernism, Valéry also manifests the symbolist determinant in these lyrical noetic transcendences. This symbolist determinant implies the hidden analogies between phenomena of the objective reality of being and the cosmic enigmas, which the poet reveals through a form of intellectual clairvoyance in contextual contrast to the imaginative clairvoyance of Arthur Rimbaud and his extreme creative method of disordering of all the senses (‘dérèglement de tous les sens’). Through Valéry’s creative habitus we can discover a form of sui generis noetic clairvoyance where the Eye of Thought symphonises the invisible essences of reality into a harmonious and delicately sculpted image of the world and reality.

1. A poet enchanted by the endless dawn of the mind

Je fais des pas admirables
Dans les pas de ma raison.
P. Valéry, ‘Aurore’[8]

In the sonnet ‘Pomegranates’ (‘Les grenades’), with the magical eyes of the Intellect, the poet contemplates the enigmatic geometry of the red fruits, relating them with the enigma of the being of Poetry. In the architectural and morphological naturalism of the fruit, these ‘tough pomegranates half-opening’ are objectified in their mysterious polysemic associative emanation while they are ‘bursting with their discoveries!’ (Valéry 1971: 207). Valéry semanticises the pomegranate as a structure that, like the poem, seemingly hides no secrets. Very similarly, in Valéry’s ‘Song of the Columns’ (‘Cantique des colonnes’), the ancient glorious pillars are a secretive, contemplative metaphor for the musical harmony and congruence of the perfect being of the poem illuminated in the solemnity of the light of the Idea.

The poem at first glance resembles a voiceless statue. In order to speak to it, it is necessary to know the phenomenology of its coded language. The poet is amazed by the perfect structure of the pomegranate fruit – its unyielding, locked, shining construction of those grains full of light. Valéry suggests that the poem is also built from the grains of light of the Intellect. The pomegranate, like the poem, is a precious fruit of the Mind composed of brilliants full of secrets and meanings. There are indeed those suns that have endured, beneath whose rays the ruby nectar shines in the grains. Valéry speaks of the intellectual and spiritual efforts of Thought that longs to transcend the red and bright shell of the pomegranate figuratively understood as a poem. In the pomegranate under the sun arises the ecstasy of the birth of the Word that occurs in the noetic flash of Thought, in its separation from the principle of absence, emptiness, chaos, when Thought becomes Being. The poem is a complex, mathematically constructed structure. Valéry’s pomegranates are actualized as a locked, scintillating riddle that refers to the solemn act of unlocking the poem’s being. Through a figurative transposition of the idea of ​​the cosmogenesis of the poem – just as the mythical Athena emerged from the head of Zeus, and the nectar of light erupts from the pomegranate, so does the gnoseological amazement of the poem appear as a revelation of its locked meanings. The poem composed of verses in its semantic autotelicity is a pomegranate that, through its shiny shell, shields itself from the external and profane world. Through the artistic estrangement of the aesthetics of nature, or, the nature of aesthetics, Valéry depicts the poem in the structures of the red pomegranate that presents only a shadow of the Ideal that the poet dreams of, and which can be conquered only in its mysterious Parnassian realm of ontological self-sufficiency.

In the poem ‘The Young Fate’ (‘La jeune Parque’) from 1917, Valéry presents the nocturnal journey of the soul of Clotho – the youngest of the three mythical Parcae (Moirai – in ancient Greek mythology) who is the goddess of fate. The young Fate is a spinner who spins the thread of life. In the night full of shadows and lights, in a state of dreaming, she is bitten by a snake (an evocative mythical and Old Testament trickster symbol)[9]. Awakening does not chase away the mists of young Fate’s nightmare, from whose darkness her ecstatic cry moves into reality. The young Fate, in the introspective reflection on the inner, spiritual world, begins to question herself in the chains of the somnambulic delirium aroused by the serpent’s venom. Sitting by the shores of the sea waves, the nocturnal wandering of the spirit swings between dream and reality. The spirit of the young Fate wanders through that moonlit night and among the reflective realms of memory, regret and dreams. In her soliloquy of spiritual paroxysm, the young Fate suffers in the realization that a destructive poison has dissolved within her being, and that which is alien and threatening lurks within her, when even the metaphysical dream of immortality has been extinguished for a moment. Remembering the past, as her spirit is tempted and lonely, she laments the lost shadow of the being she once was. Time in the sea of night whirls in an eternal metaphysical agony of the consciousness of the young Fate who longs for the arrival of dawn. This tormented young soul falls into the unknowable abysses of fear and loneliness. She disappears into the shadowy night, into the rustling of cypresses and dreams of golden skies and vast seas. Amidst the nightmarish eclipses over the spirit, in the epilogue of the poem appears the cathartic consolation of the Dawn from which the being of Consciousness emerges: ‘Thing of mystery, me, are you living yet!’ (Valéry 1971: 91) – exclaims the young Fate who finally plunges into the sea of light and into the realm of day. The reflections of the young Fate are an allegory of the poet’s spiritual drama. The poet is torn between the Apollonian lights of day and the Dionysian darkness, between memory and consciousness, between ephemerality and eternity, between the phantasm and the light of dawn over the sea of life. That is the dialectical contrast between the Intellect or the Spirit and the ontological finitude of empirical existence. The poet, just like the young Fate, must overcome the night, the fear, and the doubts of the spirit in order to discover the metaphysical Absolute.

Reviving the Orphic mystery of the creative act, Valéry in his sonnet ‘Orpheus’ (‘Orphée’), actualises the melic and syncretic melange between word and music. Orpheus is the ancient and mythical enchanter of Song, the ancestor of the modern Poet. But what power does the poet possess?! When Orpheus sings, he animates the forces in nature because he is given the divine gift to recreate the World once more in the cosmogenesis of the song. Valéry’s Orpheus sings and ‘sits on the sky’s resplendent rim!’ (Valéry 1971: 9), and his soul fuses itself with the golden temple of the music of Thought. Valéry spares Orpheus from the merciless wrath of the maenads, sheltering him in the temple of the sacred Intellect. The Orphic tragedy in Valéry’s verses is a drama of transfiguration. His Orpheus sings with the voice of the genius of light. This mythical poet who transforms the loneliness, the darkness of the night, the deprivation of love, is faced with the being of language as a spiritual trial. The poet’s being overcomes the agony of uncertainty during the creation of the perfect Song with magical power. But even when he suffers, the poet must, as Orpheus once did, continue to sing, longing to become a Song himself. Valéry’s Orpheus sings and ‘spontaneously assembles, taking shape in the gold, / Obeying the giant soul of the great hymn on the lyre!’ (Valéry 1971: 9) – and then everything is transformed into pure apotheosis. The poet unites with the musical spirit of reflection, purifying Thought and Language through the strings of the magical Lyre of Intellect.

***

Poets are beings who never disappear. Each of them can always be found somewhere. Paul Valéry is a poet who can always be found standing in the face of the dawn that appears in its infinite duration.

References

Пастернак, Борис. (1965). Стихотворения и поэмы. Москва–Ленинград: Советский писатель.

Фридрих, Гуго. (2010). Cтруктура современной лирики – От Бодлера до середины двадцатого столетия. Москва: Языки славянских культур.

Baudelaire, Charles. (1925). Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire: L’art romantique. Paris: Louis Conard, Libraire-Éditeur.

Burk, Edmund. (1844). A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (2002). Filozofija i poezija. Beograd: Javno preduzeće Službeni list SRJ.

Hajdeger, Martin. (1982). Mišljenje i pevanje. Nolit: Beograd.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. (1945). Œuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé. Paris: Gallimard.

Poe, Edgar Allan. (1906). The Raven and The Philosophy of Composition. San Francisco: Paul Elder and Co.

Rimbaud, Arthur. (1900). Œuvres. Paris: Mercure de France.

Valéry, Paul. (1971). The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. Poems. V. 1. (ed. Jackson Mathews), (trans. David Paul). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Valéry, Paul. (1975). The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Moi. V. 15. (ed. Jackson Mathews). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Valéry, Paul. (1985). The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. The Art of Poetry. V. 7. (ed. Jackson Mathews). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

[1] ‘– Oh mothering Intelligence’, P. Valéry, ‘Poetry’.

[2] Valéry, in an interview with S. Bach entitled ‘The Avenues of the Mind’, in Paris, in March 1927, notes the following conviction: ‘As you know, I do not believe in miracles of inspiration in art, and especially in poetry and music’ (Valéry 1975: 345).

[3] This conviction of Valéry’s regarding resistance to definability and the absoluteness of semantic schemes in the verses, does not only echo the symbolist cult of self-sufficiency and the esoteric monadicity of the poem, but, apparently, also reflects certain intimate reconsiderations and dramas of the personal being and spirit of the poet himself. Hence, in the autopoietic text My Work and I, Valéry admits: ‘I have an instinctive horror of anything that defines me to myself’ (Valéry 1975: 340).

[4] Jean Moréas is the author of the manifesto of French symbolism, published on September 18, 1886, in the Parisian journal Figaro (Figaro Littéraire). Moréas, in this manifesto, will underline that the essential rule in symbolist art is not to allow the core of Idea itself to be revealed.

[5] Valéry, like Mallarmé, confirms the congenial affinity with the postulates of Edgar Allan Poe, who in The Philosophy of Composition (1846), emphasizes that the compositional architecture of The Raven is nothing other than the result of a perfect logical outcome of the artistry that generates the internal structural logic of the verse through a repertoire of creative procedures: ‘It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition – that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem’ (Poe 1906: 21). Valéry brings Poe’s poetics into harmony with two primary orientations that he recognised in the American precursor of symbolism, that is to say – the visionary and the logical tendency. From Poe, he will also accept the distinction between science and metaphysics, and the disparity between rationalism and mysticism.

[6] Valéry himself asserts that many of his poems, in fact, began as impressive rhythmical or musical and metrical schemes, which then imposed words, images, ideas and associations on themselves.

[7] This symbolist principle finds a reminiscence in the aesthetic reflections of Edmund Burke, according to whom the task of verse consists in the power ‘to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves’ (Burk 1844: 213).

[8] ‘I am making admirable strides / In the paces of my reason.’ (P. Valéry, ‘Dawn’)

[9] The serpent as a tempter and deceiver appears in countless archaic narratives: the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve from the Book of Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice…