The Art of Poetry

Volume Seven of the Bollingen Series presents Paul Valéry's essential meditations on poetic craft and theory, introduced with characteristic insight by T.S. Eliot. This 1961 Vintage Books edition gathers Valéry's most penetrating essays on the art of versification, exploring the deliberate formal work that transforms intuition into enduring verse.

Valéry examines the poems of La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud with the precision of what Eliot termed "a cool scientist, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer." The French polymath's analytical approach revolutionized twentieth-century thinking about poetic composition, treating the poet as craftsman rather than purely inspired oracle.

Published as part of the celebrated Bollingen Series at Princeton University Press, this paperback represents the accessible format of one of the century's most significant contributions to literary criticism. Valéry's philosophically rigorous yet deeply felt writing speaks to anyone interested in how great poems are made, not merely what they mean.

Publishing Details: Vintage Books (imprint of Random House), New York, 1961. Paperback edition of the Bollingen Series Volume XLV. Translated from the French by Denise Folliot. Introduction by T.S. Eliot.