Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher.
Although he had flirted with nationalist ideas during the 1890s, he moved away from them by 1899, and believed that European culture owed its greatness to the ethnic diversity and universalism of the Roman Empire.
On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry underwent an existential crisis, an event that made a huge impact on his writing career.
Eventually, around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years.
Although he had flirted with nationalist ideas during the 1890s, he moved away from them by 1899, and believed that European culture owed its greatness to the ethnic diversity and universalism of the Roman Empire.
After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university and then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1900, he married Jeannine Gobillard, a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé's family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot.
The first, Album des vers anciens (Album of old verses), was a revision of early but beautifully wrought smaller poems, some of which had been published individually before 1900.
When, in 1917, he finally broke his 'great silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque, he was forty-six years of age. ===La Jeune Parque=== This obscure, but sublimely musical, masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets, had taken him four years to complete, and it immediately secured his fame.
In 1920 and 1922, he published two slim collections of verses.
In 1920 and 1922, he published two slim collections of verses.
The English-language collection The Outlook for Intelligence (1989) contains translations of a dozen essays related to these activities. In 1931, he founded the Collège International de Cannes, a private institution teaching French language and civilization.
The Collège is still operating today, offering professional courses for native speakers (for educational certification, law and business) as well as courses for foreign students. He gave the keynote address at the 1932 German national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
In 1937, he was appointed chief executive of what later became the University of Nice.
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher.
He was the inaugural holder of the Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France. During World War II, the Vichy regime stripped him of some of these jobs and distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation, but Valéry continued, throughout these troubled years, to publish and to be active in French cultural life, especially as a member of the Académie française. Valéry died in Paris in 1945.
His poem, Palme, inspired James Merrill's celebrated 1974 poem Lost in Translation, and his cerebral lyricism also influenced the American poet, Edgar Bowers. ===Prose works=== His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and bons mots, reveal a skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical.
To date, the Cahiers have been published in their entirety only as photostatic reproductions, and only since 1980 have they begun to receive scholarly scrutiny.
Blood and time". In the book "El laberinto de la soledad" from Octavio Paz there are three verses of one of Valéry's poems: Je pense, sur le bord doré de l’univers A ce gout de périr qui prend la Pythonisse En qui mugit l’espoir que le monde finisse. ==In popular culture== Oscar-winning Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film The Wind Rises and the Japanese novel of the same name (on which the film was partially based) take their title from Valéry's verse "Le vent se lève...
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