Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry was born in Sète on 30 October 1871, the son of a customs official of Corsican origin. He studied law at Montpellier and became friends with Pierre Louÿs, André Gide and Stéphane Mallarmé. After a personal crisis in 1892, he stopped publishing verse for nearly twenty years and set down his reflections in notebooks. An editor at the Ministry of War, then secretary to Édouard Lebey at the Havas agency, he returned to poetry in 1917. Elected to the Académie française in 1925 and professor at the Collège de France in 1937, he died in Paris on 20 July 1945.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryThe Graveyard by the SeaLe Cimetière marinPaul Valéry · 1920LiteraturePublic domain