Paul Valéry was born in Sète, a fishing port on the Mediterranean coast of France, to a Corsican father and an Italian mother. As a young man in Montpellier and then Paris, he wrote graceful poems in the manner of the Symbolists, and he became a devoted follower of Stéphane Mallarmé, attending his famous Tuesday evenings.

Then, in the autumn of 1892, came what he called his “night of Genoa.” Staying with relatives in that Italian city, in the middle of a violent storm and a painful, hopeless love, he resolved to give up being ruled by his feelings and to devote himself instead to understanding how the mind works. For about twenty years he published almost no poetry. He wrote an essay on Leonardo da Vinci’s method and a short, odd book about an imaginary man of pure intellect, Monsieur Teste, and he took a quiet job as private secretary to a business executive.

And every morning, rising before dawn, he wrote in his notebooks. He kept it up for more than fifty years, filling some 260 of them, on mathematics, language, dreams, attention and the nature of thought. They were never meant to be a book.

In 1912, his friend André Gide urged him to gather his early poems for publication. Valéry began a short new poem to go with them, and it took him four years and grew to more than five hundred lines. La Jeune Parque (The Young Fate), published in 1917, made him famous overnight. A few years later came “Le Cimetière marin” (The Graveyard by the Sea), set among the white tombs on the hill above Sète, looking out over the shining water at noon. It ends with the line “Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre”: the wind is rising, we must try to live.

He became a national figure, was elected to the Académie française, and lectured everywhere. One remark of his is endlessly repeated in writing classes: that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. When he died in 1945, Charles de Gaulle gave him a state funeral, and he was buried in the graveyard by the sea.