Paul Ambroise Valéry (1871-1945), often regarded as the greatest French poet of the 20th century, was Mallarmé's successor in the hermetic and intellectual tradition and the challenger of all advocates of spontaneity, inspiration, or sentimental effusiveness in poetry.

Paul Valéry was born in Sète, on the Mediterranean, on Oct. 30, 1871, of a French father of Corsican descent and an Italian mother. As a boy, looking out over the sea, he dreamed of becoming a ship captain. But he was too deficient in mathematics to qualify for the Naval Academy, so after attending the lycée at Montpellier, where his father had moved, he went to the University of Montpellier as a student of law. Literature, however, interested him more than jurisprudence. In 1890 he met Pierre Louÿs and André Gide, who spoke to Valéry about the...