A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valery, one of the
major French literary figures of the twentieth century. Heir to
Mallarme and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul
Valery was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers,
great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he
stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century
and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on
three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these
poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster
intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the
published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten
and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a
private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of
notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their
existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides;
but once made public it took years for their significance to be
fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published
in Valery's lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an
accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from
his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and
fragmentary "exercise of thought," a restless intellectual quest as
unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable
as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection
shows both sides of Valery: the craftsman of sublimely refined
verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human
intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential
poetic works--Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and
Charms--with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes
with the prose poem "The Angel." Masterfully translated by
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a
natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of
Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most
beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the
twentieth century.
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