The Art of Poetry (Bollingen Series XLV Vol. 7)

About this book

All of Valerys 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 Valerys own words the poet is characterized as a "cool scientist almost an algebraist in the service of a subtle dreamer." Valery focuses his attention on the deliberate formal work that transforms the dream into the poem in his own poems as well as in analyses of La Fontaine Victor Hugo Baudelaire the Symbolists Mallarm Rimbaud and others.