Paul Valéry is the last great representative of the late nineteenth-century symbolist movement in French poetry, prolonging into the first half of the twentieth century the forms and themes of such predecessors as Charles Baudelaire and, more particularly, Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he knew and admired.

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was born on 31 October 1871 some eighty miles west of Marseilles in the small seaport of Sète on the Mediterranean coast of France. His father, Barthélémy Valéry, a customs officer, was Corsican by birth, and his mother, Fanny Valéry (née de Grassi), was Italian. In 1884 his family moved to the nearby town of Montpellier. His school days were unremarkable, as were his unenthusiastic studies of law at the university in Montpellier, where he matriculated in 1888. He interrupted his studies to perform a year...