On a Passage of Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought”

…though made by someone other than the speaker and addressed to someone other than the listener…it is a language within a language.”

Paul Valéry — On a Passage from the Lecture “Poetry and Abstract Thought”

How do we view Paul Valéry today? — and by this I mean only in the US. Are courses taught in his name? How many dissertations are being churned out devoted to him? Only six of the fifteen volumes in the noted Bollingen series of his collected works are in print. Most young bookish people probably know him best from his gnome-like epigraph at the beginning of Blood Meridian: “Finally, your fear blood more and more. Blood and time.” Who was this sphinx, of whom André Gide said of him: “…amazing as always, but in whose cosmos I can’t breathe”? It’s hard to come upon the grain of an answer, but his type of imbricated thought is best situated in his own pronouncements, as in a lecture “Remarks on Poetry,” given in 1927: “But man is man only through his will and power to preserve or to re-establish what it is important for him to salvage from the natural decay of things…All the arts have been created to perpetuate and change, each according to its essence, an ephemeral moment of delight into the certainty of an infinity of delightful moments.” James R. Lawler, in the anthology from the Bollingen series, gives a good prospectus of his life:

…Valéry’s own ambition…was to safeguard his secrets, to choose anonymity. He was the bourgeois from the provinces leading a life without events and conforming in exterior things to general face of his age; not for him the voyages to the East, the various wanderings of a Claudel or a Gide. At the same time he sought to inhabit an island of the spirit of which he was the Robinson, a domain his alone that he could codify and control…he wrote… “Events are the froth of things, but my true interest is the sea.

“Poetry and Abstract Thought” was a lecture given at Oxford on March 1, 1939. It is a lecture in the sense that Valéry addresses an audience rather than a reader, but essayistic tendencies still flare out. This piece and “Man and His Sea Shell” are probably his two greatest essays, but the former goes to more places and sets a quite different tone. It is in the first half of the essay that the above passage comes about. There has just been a small anecdote about Degas and Mallarmé, with Degas bemoaning: “I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.” And Mallarmé: “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.” Valéry is pointing out the “transformation” which “intervenes…between the thought that produces ideas” and “verse” “which answers no need unless it be the need it must itself create — this “strange discourse” is verse: it “never speaks but of absent things or of things profoundly and secretly felt…” — quite a mountain of projection. Why speak only of absent things? Certainly this could not be true? Even Valéry has a poem about a rower. But the absence… The next phrases in this long triumphant sentence will instruct us: “strange discourse [yes!], as though made by someone other than the speaker and addressed to someone other than the listener. In short, it is a language within a language.” Admittedly so, Valerie is saying the poet makes the poem and it’s addressed to a secret person, though the general listener listens. A “language within a language” is the endpoint of the paragraph, which he will go on to explicate, but what has Valéry touched in this passage? He started with an anecdote and proceeded to fill in a disquisition on words versus ideas, before highlighting the thought that produces ideas and verse “which answers the need it itself creates”. Perhaps one has to go to other areas of essay to set off the gleams of mica in this one. About ten pages later he adjudicates between different types of language, while writing that the poem “does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been.” Then he gives a metaphor of a pendulum oscillating between two points: form and content, before asking the audience to observe the effects of poetry on themselves: “You will find that at each line the meaning produced within you, far from destroying the musical form communicated to you, recalls it.” More unorthodox but irrepressible notions. What I take most from Valéry is his subterranean effects — where others speak of surface meanings or highly politicized ones (Marxism, etc.), Valéry is only interested to sit “brooding on the vast Abyss and [make] it pregnant.” If poetry is “a language within a language” then secrets abound, reversals are common. The speaker of the poem is not the poet, and the poet often writes to an unnamed presence, just as the old masters’s paintings of the Crucifixion or the Madonna and Child are not pictures of these mythically-stretched figures but self-portraits or pictures of people they knew. The more one delves into some words or ideas the more they come undone, cheesecloth in the ocean, before re-forming into that “language within language.” Not events, not ideas, but the sea itself which transforms what we think into what we could not have imagined.