'The wind is rising!... Let us try to live!' One of the preeminent intellectuals of modern French culture, Val?ry is widely considered one of the country's greatest poets of the twentieth century. Following a flurry of sonnets in his late teens, he abruptly abandoned verse for twenty years. If the publication of The Young Fate in 1917 won him immediate and immense acclaim, his status as the outstanding poet of the era was firmly...