This is an informal collection of essays and speeches on the writers who in one way or another counted for Valéry in the shaping of his mind or in his affections and interests: Descartes, Voltaire, Stendhal, Goethe, Villon, Nietzsche...
This collection of Valéry's occasional pieces—speeches, interviews, articles—shows him very much as the public figure, the first in demand when an "occasion" needed a prominent person. Included are his speech before the French...
A selection of writings that portray the inner life of the artist. Included are several short autobiographical pieces in which Valéry talks about his early childhood, his adolescence, his military experience, his travels, his poetry...
Although not autobiographical in any usual sense, Valéry's novel is profoundly personal. Monsieur Teste reflects Valéry's preoccupation with the phenomenon of a mind detached from sensibility, yet he is also an ordinary fictional...
Valéry's dialogues are considered his most important works of imagination in prose. The volume brings together for the first time all the formal dialogues, including Eupalinos and six other pieces.
All of Valery's major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry are included in this volume. T.S. Eliot writes in his introduction that Valery "invented, and was to impose on his age . . . a new conception of the poet." In...