We know the shattering incipit of The Crisis of the Spirit , written just after the Great War: "We civilizations now know that we are mortal." We know less about what follows, where Paul Valéry wonders after the tragedy: "No one can say what tomorrow will be dead or alive in literature, in philosophy, in aesthetics. No one knows yet which ideas and which modes of expression will be inscribed on the list of losses, what new products will be proclaimed. ” It was a century ago. The subject has not aged.
At the evening of his life, the poet of La Jeune Parque composed a kind of personal anthology, taken up by Gallimard in 1941, Mélange . For the old academician, the unhappy lover, it's time to take stock, completed by Tel Quel and Mauvaises Thoughts . Make way for memories and impressions, reflections and doubts, sentences, poems ( Cantata du narcisse ) and reveries…
Everything in these fragments written over the decades, some of which are drawn from the 28,000
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