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By Root 16632 0

if I have understood him, maintains that while the ele­ment of la potsie pure is necessary to make a poem a poem, no poem can consist of la poisie pure solely. But what has happened in the case of Valéry is a change of attitude toward the subject matter. We must be careful to avoid saying that the subject mat­ter becomes 'less important'. It has rather a different kind of importance: it is important as means: the end is the poem. The subject exists for the poem, not the poem for the subject. A poem may employ several subjects, combining them in a particular way; and it may be meaningless to ask 'What is the subject of the poem?' From the union of several subjects there appears, not an­other subject, but the poem.

Here I should like to point out the difference between a theory of poetry propounded by a student of aesthetics, and the same theory as held by a poet. It is one thing when it is simply an ac­count of how the poet writes, without knowing it, and another thing when the poet himself writes consciously according to that theory. In affecting writing, the theory becomes a different thing from what it was merely as an explanation of how the poet writes. And Valéry was a poet who wrote very consciously and de­liberately indeed: perhaps, at his best, not wholly under the guid­ance of theory; but his theorizing certainly affected the kind of poetry that he wrote. He was the most self-conscious of all poets.

To the extreme self-consciousness of Valéry must be added an­other trait: his extreme scepticism. It might be thought that such a man, without belief in anything which could be the subject of poetry, would find refuge in a doctrine of 'art for art's sake'. But Valéry was much too sceptical to believe even in art. It is significant, the number of times that he describes something he has written as an tbauche—a rough draft. He had ceased to be­lieve in ends, and was only interested in processes. It often seems as if he had continued to write poetry, simply because he was interested in the introspective observation of himself engaged in writing it: one has only to read the several essays-sometimes in­deed more exciting than his verse, because one suspects that he was more excited in writing them—in which he records his observa­tions. There is a revealing remark in Variete V, the last of his books of collected papers: 'As for myself, who am, I confess, much more concerned with the formation or the fabrication of works [of art] than with the works themselves,' and, a little later in the same volume: 'In my opinion the most authentic philosophy is not in the objects of reflection, so much as in the very act of thought and its manipulation.'

Here we have, brought to their culmination by Valéry, two notions which can be traced back to Poe. There is first the doc­trine, elicited from Poe by Baudelaire, which I have already quoted: 'A poem should have nothing in view but itself; second the notion that the composition of a poem should be as conscious and deliberate as possible, that the poet should observe himself in the act of composition-and this, in a mind as sceptical as Valéry's, leads to the conclusion, so paradoxically inconsistent with the other, that the act of composition is more interesting than the poem which results from it.

First, there is the 'purity' of Poe's poetry. In the sense in which we speak of 'purity of language' Poe's poetry is very far from pure, for I have commented upon Poe's carelessness and unscrupulousness in the use of words. But in the sense of la potsie pure, that kind of purity came easily to Poe. The subject is little, the treatment is everything. He did not have to achieve purity by a process of purification, for his material was already tenuous. Second, there is that defect in Poe to which I alluded when I said that he did not appear to believe, but rather to entertain, theories. And here again, with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet, the imma­ture mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too sceptical