Article: Painting by the Numbers in Paul Valery.(Critical Essay)

AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS, Valery is the true son of Oscar. Don't speak to him of content, only a means to the end. This end is the creating of an autonomous artifact that transcends moral judgment and disavows paternity, as if poetry were born out of air. "Still worse and worse," as they say of mad Prince Hamlet, the poem possesses only such reality as is contained in "the play of figures." Circumscribed by conventions, "the mainspring of all games," it has a very limited purview ("Contemporary Poetry"). Valery on poetry doesn't make the heart beat faster, and you can see why Eliot, the same who said that Hamlet was less Shakespeare's masterpiece than an artistic ...

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