Modern and classical …

… The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Idea of Perfection is an apt title, for Valéry was a perfectionist, endlessly tinkering with his poems. He’s famous for his pronouncement that a poem is never finished, only abandoned; his publisher practically had to tear the manuscript of La Jeune Parqueout of his hands. “He was,” Eliot writes in his introduction to the 1958 collection The Art of Poetry, “the most self-conscious of all poets,” and in large part Valéry’s principal subject was the operations of his own sensibility.