One of the great intellectuals of modern French culture, Paul Valéry is celebrated for the lucidity with which he analyses the workings of his own mind and the spell of poetry. Although nurtured in the climate of Symbolism (and taking from Mallarmé, whose famous salon he frequented, the search for a purified poetic atmosphere and a suggestivity poised on the very edge of absence), he shows little interest in the possibility of a transcendent au-delà; the two realms which fascinate him are the inner universe of his intellect and the ‘univers poétique’, the complex state of perception and feeling which poetry can conjure up (the title of his major anthology, Charmes, suggests both sorcerer's spells and carmina, the Latin word for songs). The process of writing poetry stimulates both concerns since he can at the same time observe his brain at work and explore the intricacies and suggestive potential of poetic language. This simultaneity of observation is especially clear in those pieces which seem to propose a symbolic image of the act of poetic creation (Le Sylphe, L'Abeille, L' Insinuant and even Les Pas). The reservation implied in the phrase ‘seem to’ is necessary because of Valéry's use of the inexplicit metaphor: one is often unsure as to how many levels of meaning there are in a poem. But it would be unfair to accuse Valéry of deliberate obscurity or some mischievous game, for he is primarily interested in the making of the creative poem, and not in leaving it attached for the rest of its days to his own or any one single correct interpretation, an invalid concept in his eyes: ‘Mes vers ont le sens qu'on leur prête’.