The Amateur Poet
The poem orders and measures the chaos of thought.
Paul Valéry
Sète, 1871–Paris, 1945. French poet, essayist, and thinker, linked to symbolism and influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé. After an intellectual “crisis” in 1892, he stopped publishing poetry for two decades; during that time, he wrote his ‘Cahiers’ (more than 26,000 pages of notes on the mind, language, mathematics, and art) and worked as Édouard Lebey's secretary at the Havas agency. He returned to poetry with ‘La Jeune Parque’ (1917) and achieved great recognition with ‘Charmes’ (1922), which includes ‘Le Cimetière marin’. He also authored ‘Monsieur Teste’, ‘Eupalinos ou l’Architecte’, and ‘Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci’. He was elected to the Académie française in 1925 and held the chair of Poetics at the Collège de France (1937). He died in Paris and is buried in the Cimetière marin in his native Sète.
