Victor Hugo's Best Stanza
Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a wild and expansive critic as well as a marvelous surrealist poet. T.S. Eliot said he “illuminates like the flash of an empty cigarette lighter in the dark.” In this day of sound-bites and 45-second MP3 samples, 30-second MTV poems, try on M. Valéry’s response to a request to submit his choice for a favorite verse of a master poet’s.
from Victor Hugo’s Best Stanza:
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the way children eat cakes -- |
Very politely, you ask me to do something I disapprove of -- you want me to pick some special verse from Victor Hugo’s work which seems to have a special excellence. I do not at all like the process of separating out the “purest” or “best” part of a poem. Isn’t this like the way children eat cakes -- picking out the almonds to crunch, feeding the rest to the dog?
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picking out the almonds to crunch |
Nothing is more antithetical to the true nature of poetry or more antagonistic to trying to educate the populace, than to take the poem as intended by the poet and reduce it to an arbitrary number of lines. Would lovers of architecture or music be satisfied with a building reduced to its rooflines or Tristan to a table of numbers?
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and feeding the rest to the dog... |
But when it comes to impotent Poetry, it seems fine to kill the poem by extracting its “finest lines” and no one calls it murder. No, it becomes a parlor game; can you find the hidden “best alexandrine in the French language”? Whoops, sorry -- you want more, a whole stanza. Sorry to disappoint you. Let me say this: statistics and analysis of poetry require totally antipoetic mind sets.
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and no one calls murder |
What’s great about poetry is not the fine line or even the percentage of great ones that you can find in a poem and cut out from the whole; it is, in my opinion, the composition as a whole, by which I do not mean the sequence of logic and the abstract hierarchy of ideas, but the succession of images, tones, rhythms, sounds which make the poem an indivisible unity. . . . I almost said substantial! You must experience this unity of poem in the same way that you experience the movement in any of the “great lines” you so lightly suggest be extracted from it. . . .
--translated by Bob Holman
More on Paul Valéry:
- Kicking Giants library of authors has a page on Valéry -- the only such page in English devoted solely to Valéry, in fact.
- An English translation of Valéry's prose poem “Laura” is at the Think Quest Dreams site.
- David DeMaris' essay “Dynamic symbolism, chaos, and perception” takes as its starting point Valéry's meditation on natural and created form, “Man and the Seashell.”
- Aesthetica has a summary of papers given at the 1989 symposium “Paul Valéry and the aesthetic of poiesis” in Palermo.
Books by Paul Valéry available in English translation at Barnesandnoble.com:
- Seashells, tr. Ralph Manheim (1998: Beacon Press)
- La Jeune Parque, tr. Alistair Elliot (1997: Bloodaxe Books)
- The Art of Poetry, essays (1991: Princeton University Press)
- Degas, Manet, Morisot, tr. David Paul (1989: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press)
- Selected Writings of Paul Valéry (1977: New Directions)
- Dialogues, tr. William McCausland Stewart, preface by Wallace Stevens (1990: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press)
More on Victor Hugo:
- Gavroche's Patch at geocities has a page on Victor Hugo & his poetry -- which is difficult to find in English translation (though, of course, you can easily find many editions of Les Miserables & The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
- gaworth's Victor Hugo site includes this complete list of Hugo's works.
- Paul Barnette's The Western Canon site has a good brief biography of Hugo.
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