An unpublished by the writer Paul Valéry in bookstores.
All of his courses at the College de France are published Thursday, January 5 by Gallimard editions after being considered lost.
Cours de poétique
appears in two volumes:
Le corps et l'esprit, 1937-1940
and
Le langue, la société, l'histoire, 1940-1945
.
Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was one of the most influential intellectuals of the interwar period, and is appreciated today among other things for his poetic work, including
Le Cimetière marin
.
The course at the Collège de France gives a very detailed view of his conception of artistic and literary creation.
It is crossed by the tension between freedom of inspiration and the need for a form.
In January 1945, for example, during a course entitled
Advice for young writers
, he summed up:
"If to do this work, if to do this book, you have developed in yourself some of your faculties to the extreme, for this very tight work that you are doing, first of all you have a chance of surviving a little, of distinguishing yourself in an era (...), but above all you will have gained something in yourself.
A “fairly dry” teaching
This text has long kept an aura of myth, and could never see the light of day.
The specialists of Paul Valéry suspected that there were, without knowing where exactly, transcriptions of these courses.
Those of 1945 lay, somewhat forgotten, in the Valéry collection of the Jacques Doucet Literary Library.
As for those of 1938, of which no one knew the existence, they were found by miracle in the archives of the Gallimard editions
, details the one who located them, another professor of the College of France, William Marx.
Recognizing that
"Valéry's teaching was quite arid"
, he nevertheless sees in it
"a capital moment of literary and aesthetic reflection, an authentic monument of thought"
.
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