PAUL VALERY

Poetry and Abstract Thought

THE IDEA OF POETRY IS OFTEN CONTRASTED

with that of Thought, and particularly "Ab-stract Thought." People say "Poetry and Ab-

stract Thought" as they say Good and Evil, Vice andVirtue, Hot and Cold. Most people, without think-ing any further, believe that the analytical work ofthe intellect, the efforts of will and precision inwhich it implicates the mind, are incompatiblewith that freshness of inspiration, that flow of ex-pression, that grace and fancy which are the signsof poetry and which reveal it at its very first words.If a poet's work is judged profound, its profundityseems to be of a quite different order from that ofa philosopher or a scientist. Some people go so faras to think that even meditation on his art, the kindof exact reasoning applied to the cultivation ofroses, can only harm a poet, since the principaland most charming object of his desire must beto communicate the impression of a newly andhappily born state of creative emotion which,through surprise and pleasure, has the power toremove the poem once and for all from any fur-ther criticism.

This opinion may possibly contain a grain oftruth, though its simplicity makes me suspect it tobe of scholarly origin. 1 feel we have learned andadopted this antithesis without refiection, and thatwe now find it firmly fixed in our mind, as a ver-bal contrast, as though it represented a clear andreal relationship between two well-defined notions.It must be admitted that that character always ina hurry to have done, whom we call our mind, hasa weakness for this kind of simplification, whichfreely enables him to form all kinds of combina-tions and judgments, to display his logic, and todevelop his rhetorical resources—in short, to carryout as brilliantly as possible his business of beinga mind.

At all events, this classic contrast, crystallized,as it were, by language, has always seemed to metoo abrupt, and at the same time too facile, not toprovoke me to examine the things themselvesmore closely.

Poetry, Abstract Thought. That is soon said, andwe immediately assume that we have said some-thing sufficiently clear and sufficiently precise forus to proceed, without having to go back over ourexperiences; and to build a theory or begin a dis-cussion using this contrast (so attractive in its sim-plicity) as pretext, argument, and substance. Onecould even fashion a whole metaphysics—or at theleast a "psychology"—on this basis, and evolve foroneself a system of mental life, of knowledge, andof the invention and production of works of themind, whose consequence would inevitably be thesame terminological dissonance that had servedas its starting point. . . .

For my part 1 have the strange and dangeroushabit, in every subject, of wanting to begin at thebeginning (that is, at my own beginning), whichentails beginning again, going back over the wholeroad, just as though many others had not alreadymapped and traveled i t . . . .

This is the road offered to us, or imposed on us,by language.

With every question, before making any deepexamination of the content, 1 take a look at the lan-guage; 1 generally proceed like a surgeon who ster-ilizes his hands and prepares the area to be oper-ated on. This is what I call cleaning up the verbalsituation. You must excuse this expression equat-

ing the words and forms of speech with the handsand instruments of a surgeon.

I maintain that we must be careful of a prob-lem's first contact with our minds. We should becareful of the first words a question utters in ourmind. A new question arising in us is in a state ofinfancy; it stammers; it finds only strange terms,loaded with adventitious values and associations;it is forced to borrow these. But it thereby insensi-bly deflects our true need. Without realizing it wedesert our original problem, and in the end weshall come to believe that we have chosen an opin-ion wholly our own, forgetting that our choice wasexercised only on a mass of opinions that are the

from it an illustration that, for me, nicely conveysthis strange property of our verbal material.

Each and every word that enables us to leap sorapidly across the chasm of thought, and to followthe prompting of an idea that constructs its ownexpression, appears to me like one ofthose lightplanks which one throws across a ditch or a moun-tain crevasse and which will bear a man crossingit rapidly. But he must pass without weighing onit, without stopping—above all, he must not takeit into his head to dance on the slender plank totest its resistance!... Otherwise the fragile bridgetips or breaks immediately, and all is hurled intothe depths. Consult your own experience; and you

We should be careful of the first wordsa question utters in our mind.

more or less blind work of other men and ofchance. This is what happens with the programsof political parties, no one of which is (or can be)the one that would exactly match our temperamentand our interests. If we choose one among them,we gradually become the man suited to that partyand to that program.

Philosophical and aesthetic questions are sorichly obscured by the quantity, diversity, and an-tiquity of researches, arguments, and solutions, allproduced within the orbit of a very restricted vocab-ulary, of which each author uses the words accord-ing to his own inclinations, that taken as a wholesuch works give me the impression of a district inthe classical Underworld especially reserved fordeep thinkers. Here, are the Danaides, Ixions, andSisyphuses, eternally laboring to fill bottomlesscasks and to push back the falling rock, that is, toredefine the same dozen words whose combina-tions form the treasure of Speculative Knowledge.

Allow me to add to these preliminary consider-ations one last remark and one illustration. Hereis the remark: you have surely noticed the curiousfact that a certain word, which is perfectly clearwhen you hear or use it in everyday speech, andwhich presents no difficulty when caught up in therapidity of an ordinary sentence, becomes myste-riously cumbersome, offers a strange resistance,defeats all efforts at definition, the moment youwithdraw it from circulation for separate study andtry to find its meaning after taking away its tem-porary function. It is almost comic to inquire theexact meaning of a term that one uses constantlywith complete satisfaction. For example: I stop theword Time in its flight. This word was utterlylimpid, precise, honest, and faithful in its serviceas long as it was part of a remark and was utteredby someone who wished to say something. Buthere it is, isolated, caught on the wing, it takes itsrevenge. It maJces us believe that it has more mean-ings than uses. It was only a means, and it has be-come an end, the object of a terrible philosophicaldesire. It turns into an enigma, an abyss, a tormentof thought....

It is the same with the word Life and all the rest.This readily observed phenomenon has taken on

great critical value for me. Moreover, I have drawn

will find that we understand each other, and our-selves, only thanks to our rapid passage over words.We must not lay stress upon them, or we shall seethe clearest discourse dissolve into enigmas andmore or less learned illusions.

But how are we to think—I should say rethink,study deeply whatever seems to merit deep study—if we hold language to be something essentiallyprovisional, as a banknote or a check is provisional,what we call its "value" requiring us to forget itstrue nature, which is that of a piece of paper, gen-erally dirty? The paper has passed through so manyhands. . . . But words have passed through somany mouths, so many phrases, so many uses andabuses, that the most delicate precautions must betaken to avoid too much confusion in our mindsbetween what we think and are trying to think, andwhat dictionaries, authors, and, for that matter, thewhole human race since the beginning of lan-guage, want us to think.. . .

I shall therefore take care not to accept what thewords Poetry and Abstract Thought suggest to methe moment they are pronounced. But I shall lookinto myself. There I shall seek my real difficultiesand my actual observations of my real states; thereI shall find my own sense of the rational and theirrational; I shall see whether the alleged antithe-sis exists and how it exists in a living condition. Iconfess that it is my habit, when dealing with prob-lems of the mind, to distinguish between thosewhich I might have invented and which representa need truly felt by my mind, and the rest, whichare other people's problems. Of the latter, morethan one (say forty per cent) seem to me to be non-existent, to be no more than apparent problems: /do not feel them. And as for the rest, more than oneseem to me to be badly stated.... 1 do not say Iam right. I say that I observe what occurs withinmyself when I attempt to replace the verbal for-mulas by values and meanings that are nonverbal,that are independent of the language used. 1 dis-cover naive impulses and images, raw products ofmy needs and of my personal experiences. It is mylife itself that is surprised, and my life must, if it can,provide my answers, for it is only in the reactionsof our life that the full force, and as it were thenecessity, of our truth can reside. The thought pro-

MARCH/APRIL2OO7 61

ceeding from that life never uses for its own ac-count certain words which seem to it fit only forexternal consumption; nor certain others whosedepths are obscure and which may only deceivethought as to its real strength and value.

I have, then, noticed in myself certain stateswhich I may well call poetic, since some of themwere finally realized in poems. They came aboutfrom no apparent cause, arising from some acci-dent or other; they developed according to theirown nature, and consequently I found myself fora time jolted out of my habitual state of mind.Then, the cycle completed, I returned to the ruleof ordinary exchanges between my life and mythought. But meanwhile a poem had been made,and in completing itself the cycle left somethingbehind. This closed cycle is the cycle of an actwhich has, as it were, aroused and given externalform to a poetic power....

On other occasions I have noticed that some noless insignificant incident caused—or seemed tocause—a quite different excursion, a digression ofanother nature and with another result. For exam-ple, a sudden concatenation of ideas, an analogy,would strike me in much the way the sound of ahom in the heart of a forest makes one prick upone's ears, and virtually directs the co-ordinatedattention of all one's muscles toward some pointin the distance, among the leafy depths. But thistime, instead of a poem, it was an analysis of thesudden intellectual sensation that was taking holdof me. It was not verses that were being formedmore or less easily during this phase, but someproposition or other that was destined to be incor-porated among my habits of thought, some for-mula that would henceforward serve as an instru-ment for further researches. . . .

I apologize for thus revealing myself to you; butin my opinion it is more useful to speak of whatone has experienced than to pretend to a knowl-edge that is entirely impersonal, an observationwith no observer. In fact there is no theory that isnot a fragment, carefully prepared, of some auto-biography.

I do not pretend to be teaching you anything atall. I will say nothing you do not already know; butI will, perhaps, say it in a different order. You donot need to be told that a poet is not always inca-pable of solving a rule of three; or that a logician isnot always incapable of seeing in words somethingother than concepts, categories, and mere pretextsfor syllogisms.

On this point I would add this paradoxical re-mark: if the logician could never be other than alogician, he would not, and could not, be a logi-cian; and if the poet were never anything but apoet, without the slightest hope of being able toreason abstractly, he would leave no poetic tracesbehind him. I believe in all sincerity that if eachman were not able to live a number of other livesbesides his own, he would not be able to live hisown life.

My experience has thus shown me that the sameseifcan. take very different forms, can become anabstract thinker or a poet, by successive specializa-tions, each of which is a deviation from that en-tirely unattached state which is superficially in ac-cord with exterior surroundings and which is theaverage state of our existence, the state of undif-ferentiated exchanges.

Let us first see in what may consist that initialand invariably accidental shock which will constructthe poetic instrument within us, and above all,what are its effects. The problem can be put in thisway: Poetry is an art of Language; certain combi-nations of words can produce an emotion that oth-ers do not produce, and which we shall call poetic.What kind of emotion is this?

I recognize it in myself by this: that all possibleobjects of the ordinary world, external or internal,beings, events, feelings, and actions, while keepingtheir usual appearance, are suddenly placed in anindefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship withthe modes of our general sensibility. That is to saythat these well-known things and beings—or ratherthe ideas that represent them—somehow changein value. They attract one another, they are con-nected in ways quite different from the ordinary;they become (if you will permit the expression) mu-sicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically re-lated. The poetic universe, thus defined, offers ex-tensive analogies with what we can postulate of thedream world.

Since the word dream has found its way into thistalk, 1 shall say in passing that in modern times,beginning with Romanticism, there has arisen afairly understandable confusion between the no-tion of the dream and that of poetry. Neither thedream nor the daydream is necessarily poetic; itmay be so: but figures formed by chance are onlyhy chance harmonious figures.

In any case, our memories of dreams teach us,by frequent and common experience, that our con-sciousness can be invaded, filled, entirely absorbedby the production of an existence in which objectsand beings seem the same as those in the wakingstate; but their meanings, relationships, modes ofvariation and of substitution are quite different anddoubtless represent, like symbols or allegories, theimmediate fluctuations of our genera/ sensibilityuncontrolled by the sensitivities of our specializedsenses. In very much the same way the poetic statetakes hold of us, develops, and finally disintegrates.

This is to say that the state of poetry is completelyirregular, inconstant, involuntary, and fragile, andthat we lose it, as we find it, by accident. But thisstate is not enough to make a poet, any more thanit is enough to see a treasure in a dream to find it,on waking, sparkling at the foot of one's bed.

A poet's function—do not be startled by this re-mark—is not to experience the poetic state: that isa private affair. His function is to create it in oth-ers. The poet is recognized—or at least everyonerecognizes his own poet—by the simple fact thathe causes his reader to become "inspired." Posi-tively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attributewith which the reader endows his poet: the readersees in us the transcendent merits of virtues andgraces that develop in him. He seeks and finds inus the wondrous cause of his own wonder.

But poetic feeling and the artificial synthesis ofthis state in some work are two quite distinctthings, as different as sensation and action. A sus-tained action is much more complex than anyspontaneous production, particularly when it hasto be carried out in a sphere as conventional asthat of language. Here you see emerging throughmy explanations the famous ABSTRACT THOUGHTwhich custom opposes to POETRY. We shall comeback to that in a moment. Meanwhile I should liketo tell you a true story, so that you may feel as I felt,and in a curiously clear way, the whole differencethat exists between the poetic state or emotion,even creative and original, and the production ofa work. It is a rather reniarkable observation of my-self that I made about a year ago.

I had left my house to relax from some tediouspiece of work by walking and by a consequentchange of scene. As I went along the street whereI live, 1 was suddenly gripped by a rhythm whichtook possession of me and soon gave me the im-pression of some force outside myself It was asthough someone else were making use of my liv-ing-machine. Then another rhythm overtook andcombined with the first, and certain strange trans-verse relations were set up between these two prin-

ciples (I am explaining myself as best I can). Theycombined the movement of my walking legs andsome kind of song I was murmuring, or ratherwhich was being murmured through me. This com-position became more and more complicated andsoon in its complexity went far beyond anything Icould reasonably produce with my ordinary, us-able rhythmic faculties. The sense of strangenessthat I mentioned became almost painful, almostdisquieting. I am no musician; I am completelyignorant of musical technique; yet here I was, preyto a development in several parts more compli-cated than any poet could dream. I argued thatthere had been an error of person, that this gracehad descended on the wrong head, since I couldmake no use of a gift which for a musician woulddoubtless have assumed value, form, and duration,while these parts that mingled and separated of-fered me in vain a composition whose cunninglyorganized sequence amazed my ignorance and re-duced it to despair.

After about twenty minutes the magic suddenlyvanished, leaving me on the bank of the Seine, asperplexed as the duck in the fable, that saw a swanemerge from the egg she had hatched. As the swanflew away, my surprise changed to reflection. Iknew that walking often induces in me a quick-ened flow of ideas and that there is a certain reci-procity between my pace and my thoughts—mythoughts modify my pace; my pace provokes mythoughts—which after all is remarkable enough,but is fairly understandable. Our various "reactionperiods" are doubtless synchronized, and it is in-teresting to have to admit that a reciprocal modi-fication is possible between a form of action whichis purely muscular and a varied production of im-ages, judgments, and reasonings.

But in the case I am speaking of, my movementin walking became in my consciousness every sub-tle system of rhythms, instead of instigating thoseimages, interior words, and potential actions whichone calls ideas. As for ideas, they are things of aspecies familiar to me; they are things that 1 cannote, provoke, and handle Butl cannot say thesame of my unexpected rhythms.

What was 1 to think.̂ I supposed that mental ac-tivity while walking must correspond with a gen-eral excitement exerting itself in the region of mybrain; this excitement satisfied and relieved itselfas best it could, and so long as its energy was ex-pended, it mattered little whether this was on ideas,memories, or rhythms unconsciously hummed.On that day, the energy was expended in a rhyth-mical intuition that developed before the awaken-ing in my consciousness o( the person who knowsthat he does not know music. I imagine it is the sameas when the person who knows he cannot fly hasnot yet become active in the man who dreams heis flying.

I apologize for this long and true story—as true,that is, as a story of this kind can be. Notice thateverything I have said, or tried to say, happened inrelation to what we call the External World, whatwe call Our Body, and what we call Our Mind, andrequires a kind of vague collaboration betweenthese three great powers.

Why have I told you this? In order to bring outthe profound difference existing between spon-taneous production by the mind—or rather by oursensibility as a whole—and the fabrication of works.In my story, the substance of a musical composi-tion was freely given to me, but the organizationwhich would have seized, fixed, and reshaped itwas lacking. The great painter Degas often re-peated to me a very true and simple remark by Mal-larme. Degas occasionally wrote verses, and someofthose he left were delightful. But he often foundgreat difficulty in this work accessory to his paint-

62 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

ing. (He was. by the way, the kind of man whowould bring all possible difficulty to any art what-ever.) One day he said to Mallarme: "Yours is a hell-ish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, andyet I'm full of ideas " And Mallarme answered:"My dear Degas, one does not make poetry withideas, but with words."

Mallarme was right. But when Degas spoke ofideas, he was, after all, thinking of inner speech orof images, which might have been expressed inwords. But these words, these secret phrases whichhe called ideas, all these intentions and perceptionsof the mind, do not make verses. There is some-thing else, then, a modification, or a transforma-tion, sudden or not, spontaneous or not, laboriousor not, which must necessarily intervene betweenthe thought that produces ideas—that activity andmultiplicity of inner questions and solutions—and,on the other hand, that discourse, so different fromordinary speech, which is verse, which is so curi-ously ordered, which answers no need unless it bethe need it must itself create, which never speaks butof absent things or of things profoundly and se-cretly felt: strange discourse, as though made bysomeone other than the speaker and addressed tosomeone other than the listener. In short, it is a lan-guage within a language.

Let us look into these mysteries.Poetry is an art of language. But language is a

practical creation. It may be observed that in allcommunication between men, certainty comesonly from practical acts and from the verificationwhich practical acts give us. / ask you for a light.You give me a light: you have understood me.

But in asking me for a light, you were able tospeak those few unimportant words with a certainintonation, a certain tone of voice, a certain inflec-tion, a certain languor or briskness perceptibleto me. I have understood your words, since with-out even thinking I handed you what you askedfor—a light. But the matter does not end there.The strange thing: the sound and as it were thefeatures of your little sentence; I come back to me,echo within me, as though they were pleased tobe there; I, too, like to hear myself repeat this lit-tle phrase, which has almost lost its meaning,which has stopped being of use, and which canyet go on living, though with quite another life. Ithas acquired a value; and has acquired it at theexpense of its finite significance. It has created theneed to be heard again.... Here we are on the verythreshold of the poetic state. This tiny experiencewill help us to the discovery of more than onetruth.

It has shown us that language can produce ef-fects of two quite different kinds. One of themtends to bring about the complete negation of lan-giiage itself I speak to you, and if you have under-stood my words, those very words are abolished.If you have understood, it means that the wordshave vanished from your minds and are replacedby their counterpart, by images, relationships, im-pulses; so tl-iat you have within you the means toretransmit these ideas and images in a languagethat may be very different from the one you re-ceived. Understanding consists in the more or lessrapid replacement of a system of sounds, intervals,and signs by something quite different, which is,in short, a modification or interior reorganizationof the person to whom one is speaking. And hereis the counterproof of this proposition: the personwho does not understand repeats the words, or hasthem repeated to him.

Consequently, the perfection of a discoursewhose sole aim is comprehension obviously con-sists in the ease with which the words forming itare transformed into something quite different:the language is transformed first into non-language

and then, if we wish, into a form of language dif-fering from the original form.

In other terms, in practical or abstract uses oflanguage, the form—that is the physical, the con-crete part, the very act of speech—does not last; itdoes not outlive understanding; it dissolves in thelight; it has acted; it has done its work; it hasbrought about understanding; it has lived.

But on the other hand, the moment this con-crete form takes on, by an efFect of its own, suchimportance that it asserts itself and makes itself,as it were, respected; and not only remarked andrespected, but desired and therefore repeated—then something new happens: we are insensiblytransformed and ready to live, breathe, and thinkin accordance with a rule and under laws whichare no longer of the practical order—that is, noth-ing that may occur in this state will be resolved,finished, or abolished by a specific act. We are en-tering the poetic universe.

Permit me to support this notion of a poetic uni-verse by referring to a similar notion that, beingmuch simpler, is easier to explain: the notion of amusical universe. I would ask you to make a smallsacrifice: limit yourselves for a moment to yourfaculty of hearing. One simple sense, like that ofhearing, will offer us all we need for our definitionand will absolve us from entering into all the dif-ficulties and subtleties to which the conventionalstructure and historical complexities of ordinarylanguage would lead us. We live by ear in the worldof noises. Taken as a whole, it is generally incoher-ent and irregularly supplied by all the mechanicalincidents which the ear may interpret as it can. Butthe same ear isolates from this chaos a group ofnoises particularly remarkable and simple—thatis, easily recognizable by our sense of hearing andfurnishing it with points of reference. These ele-ments have relations with one another which wesense as we do the elements themselves. The in-terval between two of these privileged noises is asclear to us as each of them. These are the sounds,and these units of sonority tend to form clear com-binations, successive or simultaneous implica-tions, series, and intersections which one mayterm intelligible: this is why abstract possibilitiesexist in music. But I must return to my subject.

1 will confine myself to saying that the contrastbetween noise and sound is the contrast betweenpure and impure, order and disorder; that this dif-ferentiation between pure sensations and othershas permitted the constitution of music; that it hasbeen possible to control, unify, and codify thisconstitution, thanks to the intervention of physi-cal science, which knows how to adjust measureto sensation so as to obtain the important result ofteaching us to produce this sonorous sensationconsistently, and in a continuous and identicalfashion, by instruments that are, in reality, meayuring instruments.

The musician is thus in possession of a perfectsystem of well-defined means which exactly matchsensations with acts. From this it results that mu-sic has formed a domain absolutely its ovm. Theworld of the art of music, a world of sounds, is dis-tinct from the world of noises. Whereas a noisemerely rouses in us some isolated event—a dog, adoor, a motor car—a sound evokes, of itself the mu-sical universe. If, in this hall where I am speakingto you and where you hear the noise of my voice,a tuning fork or a well-tempered instrument be-gan to vibrate, you would at once, as soon as youwere affected by this pure and exceptional noisethat cannot be confused with others, have the feel-ing of a beginning, the beginning of a world; aquite different atmosphere would immediately becreated, a new order would arise, and you your-selves would unconsciously organize yourselves to

receive it. The musical universe, therefore, waswithin you, with all its associations and propor-tions—as in a saturated salt solution a crystallineuniverse awaits the molecular shock of a minutecrystal in order to declare itself. I dare not say: thecrystalline idea of such a system awaits. . . .

And here is the counter proof of our little exper-iment: if, in a concert hall dominated by a resound-ing symphony, a chair happens to fall, someonecoughs, or a door shuts, we immediately have theimpression of a kind of rupture. Something inde-finable, something like a spell or a Venetian glass,has been broken or cracked....

The poetic universe is not created so powerfullyor so easily. It exists, but the poet is deprived of theimmense advantages possessed by the musician.He does not have before him, ready for the usesof beauty, a body of resources expressly made forhis art. He has to borrow language—the voice ofthe public, that collection of traditional and irra-tional terms and rules, oddly created and trans-formed, oddly codified, and very variedly under-stood and pronounced. Here there is no physicistwho has determined the relations between theseelements; no tuning forks, no metronomes, no in-ventors of scales or theoreticians of harmony.Rather, on the contrary, the phonetic and seman-tic fluctuations of vocabulary. Nothing pure; but amixture of completely incoherent auditive and psy-chic stimuli. Each word is an instantaneous cou-pling of a sound and a sense that have no connec-tion with each other. Each sentence is an act socomplex that I doubt whether anyone has yet beenable to provide a tolerable definition of it. As forthe use of the resources of language and the modesof this action, you know what diversity there is,and what confusion sometimes results. A dis-course can be logical, packed with sense, but de-void of rhythm and measure. It can be pleasing to

Beauty Hurts"!

But not so muchas the lack of i1

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the ear, yet completely absurd or insignificant; itcan be clear, yet useless; vague, yet delightful. Butto grasp its strange multiplicity, which is no morethan the multiplicity of life itself, it suffices toname all the sciences which have been created todeal with this diversity, each to study one ofits as-pects. One can analyze a text in many differentways, for it falls successively under the jurisdic-tion of phonetics, semantics, syntax, logic, rheto-ric, philology, not to mention metrics, prosody, andetymology.. . .

So the poet is at grips with this verbal mat-ter, obliged to speculate on sound and sense atonce, and to satisfy not only harmony and musi-cal timing but all the various intellectual and aes-thetic conditions, not to mention the conventionalrules. . . .

You can see what an effort the poet's undertak-ing would require if he had consciously to solve allthese problems... .

It is always interesting to try to reconstruct oneof our complex activities, one ofthose completeactions which demand a specialization at oncemental, sensuous, and motor, supposing that inorder to accomplish this act we were obliged tounderstand and organize all the functions that weknow play their part in it. Even if this attempt, atonce imaginative and analytical, is clumsy, it willalways teach us something. As for myself, whoam, I admit, much more attentive to the forma-tion or fabrication of works than to the worksthemselves, 1 have a habit, or obsession, of appre-ciating works only as actions. In my eyes a poetis a man who, as a result of a certain incident,undergoes a hidden transformation. He leaveshis ordinary condition of general disposability, andI see taking shape in him an agent, a living sys-tem for producing verses. As among animals onesuddenly sees emerging a capable hunter, a nestmaker, a bridge builder, a digger of tunnels andgalleries, so in a man one sees a composite organ-ization declare itself, bending its functions to aspecific piece of work. Think of a very small child:the child we have all been bore many possibilitieswithin him. After a few months of life he haslearned, at the same or almost the same time, tospeak and to walk. He has acquired two types ofaction. That is to say that he now possesses twokinds of potentiality from which the accidentalcircumstances of each moment will draw whatthey can, in answer to his varying needs and imag-inings.

Having learned to use his legs, he will discoverthat he can not only walk, but run; and not onlywalk and run, but dance. This is a great event. Hehas at that moment both invented and discovereda kind of secondary use for his limbs, a general-ization of his formula of movement. In fact,whereas walking is after all a rather dull and noteasily perfectible action, this new form of action,the Dance, admits of an infinite number of cre-ations and variations or figures.

But will he not find an analogous developmentin speech? He will explore the possibilities of hisfaculty of speech; he will discover that more canbe done with it than to ask for jam and deny hislittle sins. He will grasp the power of reasoning;he will invent stories to amuse himself when he isalone; he will repeat to himself words that he lovesfor their strangeness and mystery.

So, parallel with Walking and Dancing, he willacquire and distinguish the divergent types. Proseand Poetry.

This parallel has long struck and attracted me;but someone saw it before I did. According to Ra-can, Malherbe made use of it. In my opinion it ismore than a simple comparison. I see in it an anal-ogy as substantial and pregnant as those found in

physics when one observes the identity of formu-las that represent the measurement of seeminglyvery different phenomena. Here is how our com-parison develops.

Walking, like prose, has a definite aim. It is anact directed at something we wish to reach. Actualcircumstances, such as the need for some object,the impulse of my desire, the state of my body, mysight, the terrain, etc., which order the manner ofwalking, prescribe its direction and its speed, andgive it a definite end. All the characteristics of walk-ing derive from these instantaneous conditions,which combine in a novel way each time. There areno movements in walking that are not specialadaptations, but, each time, they are abolished and,as it were, absorbed by the accomplishment of theact, by the attainment of the goal.

The dance is quite another matter. It is, ofcourse, a system of actions; but of actions whoseend is in themselves. It goes nowhere. If it pur-sues an object, it is only an ideal object, a state, anenchantment, the phantom of a flower, an extremeof life, a smile—which forms at last on the face ofthe one who summoned it from empty space.

It is therefore not a question of carrying out alimited operation whose end is situated some-where in our surroundings, but rather of creating,maintaining, and exalting a certain state, by a pe-riodic movement that can be executed on the spot;a movement which is almost entirely dissociatedfrom sight, but which is stimulated and regulatedby auditive rhythms.

But please note this very simple observation,that however different the dance may be fromwalking and utilitarian movements, it uses thesame organs, the same bones, the same muscles,only differently co-ordinated and aroused.

Here we come again to the contrast betweenprose and poetry. Prose and poetry use the samewords, the same syntax, the same forms, and thesame sounds or tones, but differently co-ordinatedand differently aroused. Prose and poetry are there-fore distinguished by the difference between cer-tain links and associations which form and dissolvein our psychic and nervous organism, whereas thecomponents of these modes of functioning areidentical. This is why one should guard against rea-soning about poetry as one does about prose. Whatis true of one very often has no meaning when it issought in the other. But here is the great and de-cisive difference. When the man who is walkinghas reached his goal—as I said—when he hasreached the place, book, fruit, the object of his de-sire (which desire drew him from his repose), thispossession at once entirely annuls his whole act;the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbsthe means; and, whatever the act, only the resultremains. It is the same with utilitarian language:the language I use to express my design, my desire,my command, my opinion; this language, whenit has served its purpose, evaporates almost as itis heard. I have given it forth to perish, to be rad-ically transformed into something else in yourmind; and I shall know that I was understood by theremarkable fact that my speech no longer exists:it has been completely replaced by its meaning—that is, by images, impulses, reactions, or acts thatbelong to you: in short, by an interior modificationin you.

As a result the perfection of this kind of lan-guage, whose sole end is to be understood, obvi-ously consists in the ease with which it is trans-formed into something altogether different.

The poem, on the other hand, does not die forhaving lived: it is expressly designed to be bornagain from its ashes and to become endlessly whatit has just been. Poetry can be recognized by thisproperty, that it tends to get itself reproduced

in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct itidentically.

That is an admirable and uniquely characteris-tic property.

1 should like to give you a simple illustration.Think of a pendulum oscillating between two sym-metrical points. Suppose that one of these ex-tremes represents/orm: the concrete characteris-tics of the language, sound, rhythm, accent, tone,movement—in a word, the Voice in action. Thenassociate with the other point, the acnode of thefirst, all significant values, images and ideas, stim-uli of feeling and memory, virtual impulses andstructures of understanding—in short, everythingthat makes the content, the meaning of a discourse.Now observe the effect of poetry on yourselves. Youwill find that at each line the meaning producedwithin you, far from destroying the musical formcommunicated to you, recalls it. The living pendu-lum that has swung from sound to sense swingsback to its felt point of departure, as though thevery sense which is present to your mind can findno other outlet or expression, no other answer,than the very music which gave it birth.

So between the form and the content, betweenthe sound and the sense, between the poem andthe state of poetry, a symmetry is revealed, an equal-ity between importance, value, and power, whichdoes not exist in prose; which is contrary to the lawof prose—the law which ordains the inequality ofthe two constituents of language. The essentialprinciple of the mechanics of poetry—that is, of theconditions for producing the poetic state by words—seems to me to be this harmonious exchangebetween expression and impression.

I introduce here a slight observation which Ishall call "philosophical," meaning simply that wecould do without it.

Our poetic pendulum travels from our sensa-tion toward some idea or some sentiment, and re-turns toward some memory of the sensation andtoward the potential act which could reproduce thesensation. Now, whatever is sensation is essentiallypresent. There is no other definition of the presentexcept sensation itself, which includes, perhaps,the impulse to action that would modify that sen-sation. On the other hand, whatever is properlythought, image, sentiment, is always, in some way,a production of absent things. Memory is the sub-stance of all thought. Anticipation and its grop-ings, desire, planning, the projection of our hopes,of our fears, are the main interior activity of ourbeing.

Thought is, in short, the activity which causeswhat does not exist to come alive in us, lending toit, whether we will or no, our present powers, mak-ing us take the part for the whole, the image forreality, and giving us the illusion of seeing, acting,suffering, and possessing independently of ourdear old body, which we leave with its cigarette inan armchair until we suddenly retrieve it when thetelephone rings or, no less strangely, when ourstomach demands provender....

Between Voice and Thought, between Tlioughtand Voice, between Presence and Absence, oscil-lates the poetic pendulum.

The result of this analysis is to show that thevalue of a poem resides in the indissolubility ofsound and sense. Now this is a condition thatseems to demand the impossible. Here is no rela-tion between the sound and the meaning of aword. The same thing is called HORSE in English,HIPPOS in Greek, EQUUS in Latin, and CHEVAL inFrench; but no manipulation of any of these termswill give me an idea of the animal in question; andno manipulation of the idea will yield me any ofthese words—otherwise, we should easily knowall languages, beginning with our own.

64 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

Yet it is the poet's business to give us the feel-ing of an intimate union between the word andthe mind.

This must be considered, strictly speaking, amarvelous result. I say marvelous, although it is notexceptionally rare. I use marvelous in the sense wegive that word when we think of the miracles andprodigies of ancient magic. It must not be forgot-ten that for centuries poetry was used for purposesof enchantment. Those who took part in thesestrange operations had to believe in the power ofthe word, and far more in the efficacy of its soundtlian in its significance. Magic formulas are oftenwithout meaning; but it was never thought thattheir power depended on their intellectual content.

Let us listen to lines like these:

M^re des souvetiirs. maitresse des mattresses...

or

Sois sage, 6 ma Douieur, et tiens-toi plustranquitle. . . .

These words work on us (or at least on some ofus) without telling us very much. They tell us, per-haps, that they have nothing to tell us; that, by thevery means which usually tell us something, theyare exercising a quite difFerent function. They acton us like a chord of music. The impression pro-duced depends largely on resonance, rhythm, andthe number of syllables; but it is also the result ofthe simple bringing together of meanings. In thesecond of these lines the accord between the vagueideas of Wisdom and Grief, and the tender solem-nity of the tone produce the inestimable value of aspell; the momentary facing who made that line couldnot have done so had he been in a state where theform and the content occurred separately to hismind. On the contrary, he was in a special phasein the domain of his psychic existence, a phase inwhich the sound and the meaning of the word ac-quire or keep an equal importance—which is ex-cluded from the habits of practical language, asfrom the needs of abstract language. The statein which the inseparability of sound and sense, inwhich the desire, the expectation, the possibility oftheir intimate and indissoluble fusion are requiredand sought or given, and sometimes anxiouslyawaited, is a comparatively rare state. It is rare,firstly because all the exigencies of life are againstit; secondly because it is opposed to tiie crude sim-plifying and specializing of verbal notations.

But this state of inner modification, in which allthe properties of our language are indistinctly butharmoniously summoned, is not enough to pro-duce that complete object, that compound of beau-ties, that collection of happy chances for the mindwhich a noble poem offers us.

From this state we obtain only fragments. Allthe precious things that are found in the earth,gold, diamonds, uncut stones, are there scattered,strewn, grudgingly hidden in a quantity of rock orsand, where chance may sometimes uncoverthem. These riches would be nothing without thehuman labor that draws them from the massivenight where they were sleeping, assembles them,alters and organizes them into ornaments. Thesefragments of metal embedded in formless matter,these oddly shaped crystals, must owe all their lus-ter to intelligent labor. It is a labor of this kind thatthe true poet accomplishes. Faced with a beautifulpoem, one can indeed feel that it is most unlikelythat any man, however gifted, could have impro-vised without a backward glance, with no othereffort than that of writing or dictating, such a si-multaneous and complete system of lucky finds.since the traces of effort, the second thoughts, thechanges, the amount of time, the bad days, and thedistaste have now vanished, effaced by the su-

preme return of a mind over its work, some peo-ple, seeing only the perfection of the result, willlook on it as due to a sort of magic that they callINSPIRATION. They thus make of the poet a kindof temporary medium. If one were strictly to de-velop this doctrine of pure inspiration, one wouldarrive at some very strange results. For example,one would conclude that the poet, since he merelytransmits what he receives, merely delivers to un-known people what he has taken from the un-known, has no need to understand what he writes,which is dictated by a mysterious voice. He couldwrite poems in a language he did not know....

In fact, the poet has indeed a kind of spiritualenergy of a special nature; it is manifested in himand reveals him to himself in certain moments ofinfinite worth. Infinite for h im. . . . I say, infinitefor him, for, alas, experience shows us that thesemoments which seem to us to have a universalvalue are sometimes without a future, and in theend make us ponder on this maxim; what is of valuefor one person only has no value. This is the iron lawof Literature.

But every true poet is necessarily a first-ratecritic. If one doubts this, one can have no idea ofwhat the work of the mind is; that struggle with theinequality of moments, with chance associations,lapses of attention, external distractions. The mindis terribly variable, deceptive and self-deceiving,fertile in insoluble problems and illusory solutions.How could a remarkable work emerge from thischaos if this chaos that contains everything did notalso contain some serious chances to know oneselfand to choose within oneself whatever is worth tak-ing from each moment and using carefully?

That is not all. Every true poet is much more ca-pable than is generally known of right reasoningand abstract thought.

But one must not look for his real philosophy inhis more or less philosophical utterances. In myopinion, the most authentic philosophy lies not somuch in the objects of our reflection as in the veryact of thought and in its handling. Take from meta-physics all its pet or special terms, all its traditionalvocabulary, and you may realize that you have notimpoverished the thought. Indeed, you may per-haps have eased and freshened it, and you will havegot rid of otlier people's problems, so as to dealonly with your own difficulties, your surprises thatowe nothing to anyone, and whose intellectualspur you feel actually and directly.

It has often happened, however, as literary his-tory tells us. that poetry has been made to enun-ciate theses or hypotheses and that the complete lan-guage which is its own—the language whose form,that is to say the action and sensation of the Voice,is of the same power as the content, that is to saythe eventual modification of a mind—has beenused to communicate "abstract" ideas, which areon the contrary independent of their form, or sowe believe. Some very great poets have occasion-ally attempted this. But whatever may be the talentwhich exerts itself in this very noble undertaking,it cannot prevent the attention given to followingthe ideas from competing with the attention thatfollows the song. The DERERUM NATURA is hereinconfiict with the nature of things. The state of mindof the reader of poems is not the state of mind ofthe reader of pure thought. The state of mind ofa man dancing is not that of a man advancingthrough difficult country of which he is makinga topographical survey or a geological prospectus.

I have said, nevertheless, that the poet has hisabstract thought and, ifyou like, his philosophy;and 1 have said that it is at work in his very activ-ity as a poet. I said this because I have observed it,in myself and in several otliers. Here, as elsewhere,1 have no other reference, no other claim or ex-

cuse, than recourse to my own experience or to themost common observation.

Well, every time I have worked as a poet, I havenoticed that my work exacted of me not only thatpresence of the poetic universe I have spoken of.but many reflections, decisions, choices, and com-binations, without which all possible gifts of theMuses, or of Chance, would have remained likeprecious materials in a workshop without an ar-chitect. Now an architect is not himself necessar-ily built of precious materials. In so far as he is anarchitect of poems, a poet is quite different fromwhat he is as a producer of those precious ele-ments of which all poetry should be composed, butwhose composition is separate and requires an en-tirely different mental effort.

One day someone told me that lyricism is en-thusiasm, and that the odes of the great lyricistswere written at a single stroke, at the speed of thevoice of delirium, and with the wind of inspirationblowing a gale... .

I replied that he was quite right; but that thiswas not a privilege of poetry alone, and that every-one knew that in building a locomotive it is indis-pensable for the builder to work at eighty miles anhour in order to do his job.

A poem is really a kind of machine for produc-ing the poetic state of mind by means of words.The effect of this machine is uncertain, for noth-ing is certain about action on other minds. Butwhatever may be the result, in its uncertainty, theconstruction of the machine demands the solutionof many problems. If the term machine shocks you,if my mechanical comparison seems crude, pleasenotice that while the composition of even a veryshort poem may absorb years, the action of thepoem on the reader will take only a few minutes.In a few minutes the reader will receive his shockfrom discoveries, connections, glimmers of expres-

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sion that have been accumulated during monthsof research, waiting, patience, and impatience. Hemay attribute much more to inspiration than it cangive. He will imagine the kind of person it wouldtake to create, without pause, hesitation, or revi-sion, this powerful and perfect work which trans-ports him into a world where things and people,passions and thoughts, sonorities and meaningsproceed from the same energy, are transformedone into another, and correspond according to ex-ceptional laws of harmony, for it can only be an ex-ceptional form of stimulus that simultaneouslyproduces the exaltation of our sensibility, our intel-lect, our memory, and our powers of verbal action,so rarely granted to us in the ordinary course of life.

Perhaps I should remark here that the execu-tion of a poetic work—if one considers it as the en-gineer just mentioned would consider the concep-tion and construction of his locomotive, that is,making explicit the problems to be solved—wouldappear impossible. In no other art is the numberof conditions and independent functions to be co-ordinated so large. I will not inflict on you a de-tailed demonstration of this proposition. It isenough for me to remind you of what 1 said re-garding sound and sense, which are linked onlyby pure convention, but which must be made tocollaborate as effectively as possible. From theirdouble nature words often make me think of thosecomplex quantities which geometricians take suchpleasure in manipulating.

Fortunately, some strange virtue resides incertain moments in certain people's lives which

simplifies things and reduces the insurmount-able difficulties 1 spoke of to the scale of humanenergies.

The poet awakes within man at an unexpectedevent, an outward or inward incident: a tree, a face,a "subject," an emotion, a word. Sometimes it isthe will to expression that starts the game, a needto translate what one feels; another time, on thecontrary, it is an element of form, the outline of anexpression which seeks its origin, seeks a mean-ing within the space of my mind Note this pos-sible duality in ways of getting started: either some-thing wants to express itself, or some means ofexpression wants to be used.

My poem Le Cimetiere marin began in me by arhythm, that of a French line . . . often syllables,divided into four and six.! had as yet no idea withwhich to fill out this form. Gradually a few hover-ing words settled in it, little by little determiningthe subject, and my labor (a very long labor) wasbefore me. Another poem, La Fythic, first appearedas an eight-syllable line whose sound came of itsown accord. But this line implied a sentence, ofwhich it was part, and this sentence, if it existed,implied many other sentences, A problem of thiskind has an infinite number of solutions. But withpoetry the musical and metrical conditions greatlyrestrict the indefiniteness. Here is what happened:my fragment acted like a living fragment, since,plunged in the (no doubt nourishing) surround-ings of my desire and waiting thought, it prolifer-ated, and engendered all that was lacking: severallines before and a great many lines after.

I apologize for having chosen my examples frommy own Httle story: but 1 could hardly have takenthem elsewhere.

Perhaps you think my conception of the poetand the poem rather singular. Try to imagine, how-ever, what the least of our acts implies. Think ofeverything that must go on inside a man who ut-ters the smallest intelligible sentence, and then cal-culate all that is needed for a poem by Keats orBaudelaire to be formed on an empty page in frontof the poet.

Think, too, that of all the arts, ours is perhapsthat which co-ordinates the greatest number of in-dependent parts or factors: sound, sense, the realand the imaginary, logic, syntax, and the doubleinvention of content and form . . . and all this bymeans of a medium essentially practical, perpet-ually changing, soiled, a maid of all work, everydaylanguage, from which we must draw a pure, idealVoice, capable of communicating without weak-ness, without apparent effort, without offense tothe ear, and without breaking the ephemeralsphere of the poetic universe, an idea of some selfmiraculously superior to Myself. •*

From Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise FoUiot(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). Copy-right © 1958 by the Bollingen Foundation.

PAUL VALERY (1871-1945) was a member of the igth-

century poetic school of Symbolism, and its last greatrepresentative. Throughout his life Valery filled his privatenotebooks with observations on creative process and hisown methods of inquiry.

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66 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW