Paul Valéry

Mentored in youth by Stéphane Mallarmé in Paris, Valéry experienced a legendary existential crisis in Genoa in 1892 (the 'Night of Genoa'), renouncing literary ambitions to devote every dawn to analyzing the mechanics of human intellect in his monumental 261 Cahiers (Notebooks).

Returning to poetry twenty years later, he published La Jeune Parque (1917) and Charmes (1920), which included his crowning masterpiece Le Cimetière marin, meditating on death, consciousness, and the Mediterranean Sea. Elected to the Académie Française, his 1919 Crisis of the Mind famously opened: 'We civilizations now know that we are mortal'.