The Collected Works of Paul Valery in English, Vol. 7: The Art of Poetry

All of Valery's 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 upon his age, ... a new conception of the poet." As described by Valery, the poet is 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 those of La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, the Symbolists, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and others.