Les Droits du poète sur la langue
Small private printing.
One of 25 copies on Rives paper (after 5 on Japanese paper).
Signed presentation inscription: “à Madame Révelin, consolatrice des affligés, Respectueux et mince hommage, Paul Valéry.”
This pamphlet collects Valéry’s exchanges with the linguists Léon Clédat and Antoine Meillet, originally published in the Revue de philologie française. Starting from a discussion of the language of La Jeune Parque, Valéry examines the liberties a poet may take with usage. The whole of Valéry’s thought is at stake: sound, rhythm and the duration of words contribute to a poem’s composition as much as their meaning, poetry being wholly distinct from ordinary communication. The text was later reprinted in Pièces sur l’art.
Roland Barthes’s maternal grandmother, Noémi Révelin, held a literary salon on the Place du Panthéon that Valéry assiduously frequented. She had remarried the socialist journalist and philosophy professor Paul Révelin, who died in 1922.
Karaiskakis, 124.