the fact that he is not in possession of the details probably explains why his confidence in technique is so unbounded . there is even more of the mystic than of the intellectual in the young Val&amp;eacute;ry . no wonder that at this stage he more or less gives up the writing of poetry . literature is l&apos;art de se jouer de l&apos;&amp;acirc;me des autres ; by his own definition , poetry is not now for him the attempt to give expression to something in himself ( however deliberately or consciously ) ; the poet gets to know his material ( language , poetry ) , the nature of the public ( human psychology in relation to art ) , and then , like da Vinci , having discovered the relations &amp;hellip; entre des choses dont nous &amp;eacute;chappe la loi de continuit&amp;eacute; , he can , at will , produce whatever effects he desires to produce in the reader . there is only one thing missing in this ideal scheme : a desire on the part of the poet to produce any effect at all . what would be the point ? le g&amp;eacute;nie est facile . facil cosa e farsi universale . the young Val&amp;eacute;ry has more important things to do : he wants to follow up his programme of knowledge and self-knowledge ( among other things , to fathom art and psychology , the complete knowledge of which is presumed in the da Vinci and the Monsieur Teste created by him ) . the art of poetry as defined by Val&amp;eacute;ry is no longer of any interest from the creative point of view . it demands a certain sacrifice de l&apos;intellect , chiefly because he would , if he went on composing poetry , be simply giving to any public for which he wrote what he knows would affect it , playing a rather inferior game which , in theory , he knows he could not lose . the implicit reasoning is somewhat circular . if he were a da Vinci or a Monsieur Teste , he would not trouble himself with poetic composition . so he abandons it . but he is not yet , in fact , a da Vinci or a Monsieur Teste , so he will devote all his time and energy to becoming a universal mind . such , in outline , and with only a little simplification , is the theory of the young Val&amp;eacute;ry concerning inspiration and technique . it is clear that he has not yet formulated clear distinctions between total inspiration and the forms we have called intermittent , intuitive , exalted and personal ; but he rejects them by implication . attributed inspiration would presumably , it is true , have been accepted by him . but the other five forms he would have rejected : his theory allows them to be completely dispensed with . but is his theory convincing ? let us consider the first of the two conceptions of creation implicit in the technique litt&amp;eacute;raire article , according to which the poet has something in himself , impression , dream or thought , which he must communicate by controlled technique . whilst surely nearer the truth than the other , the theory that works backwards , even this conception seems mechanistic , too simple and unsatisfactory . Val&amp;eacute;ry does not examine how impression , dream or thought originate . there is no mention of any possible dynamism behind them , no mention of the fact that the initial impetus may be accompanied by emotion or excitement which are commonly envisaged as attributes of inspiration . it may be conceded that poetry is certainly the communication of something , and that accordingly it is sound to claim that the poet is concerned with an audience , so that the more knowledge he has of this audience and of the nature of his art , the better . but it is surely not simply a question , in poetic creation , of the poet &apos;s having something clearly formed in his mind , even something so vague as a dream , and then transferring it to a reader by the technique of language . the truth surely is ( and the mature Val&amp;eacute;ry certainly subscribed to this view ) that the poet is concerned with clarifying and making enjoyably articulate for himself and the reader something within him which does not exist as poetry until the poem is composed . given the nature of language and poetic creation , the poet is , to a certain extent , discovering what he has to say , or rather , what he can say , as he composes the poem . the poem is a kind of compromise between what the poet wanted to say initially ( and this phrase what the poet wanted to say is perhaps too rational and explicit to describe what for many poets is vague and more anticipation than exact intention at this stage ) , what he finds to say , and all the new things to express which occur to him as he actually composes the poem . all these aspects of poetic creation will indeed be admirably brought out by the mature Val&amp;eacute;ry . Louis MacNeice writes of that dialect of purification whereby a poem is produced , a poem which is neither the experience nor the memory , nor an abstract dance of words , but a new life composite of all three . in this respect , then , poetry can be considered as a kind of knowledge , of self-knowledge particularly , only to be found during the struggle to compose . Val&amp;eacute;ry in his youth does not show much awareness of these aspects of poetic creation and of this kind of self-knowledge . he is obsessed with the notion of art as communication , and therefore with the fact that , though the poet may be able to make the reader react as he wishes by his all-conquering technique , he is nevertheless , because he indulges in poetic composition , a slave to the reader and to language : we are thus led on to the second theory of poetry revealed with some uncertainty in the technique litt&amp;eacute;raire article and unequivocally expounded towards the end of the introduction &amp;agrave; la m&amp;eacute;thode de L&amp;eacute;onard de Vinci , the theory according to which the poet works backwards from the reader . this stands condemned on two counts . firstly , it is a partial view of poetic creation , neglecting the personal contribution which the poet can , must , make ( i.e personal inspiration ; and this is not to mention the importance of intermittent , intuitive and exalted inspiration ) . Val&amp;eacute;ry is at least consistent : having defined the work of art as une machine destin&amp;eacute;e &amp;agrave; exciter et &amp;agrave; combiner les formations individuelles de ces esprits ( the public ) , he rejects such an activity as beneath him , as time-wasting when he has more important things to do . his initial definition of art is faulty , incomplete . secondly , it stands condemned by the very inadequacy of its presentation . not only is art ill defined , but no details are given of the nature of human psychology on which the success of the triumphant technique is supposed to depend . the fact is that , at this stage of his career , he has no adequate theory of language and no adequate conception of poetic creation such as he will have in later years . few would question the value of technique , but how many would subscribe to the exaggerated thesis put forward by Val&amp;eacute;ry in his youth ? nothing is more significant than the detached humour with which Val&amp;eacute;ry , in 1919 , in the note et digression which he wrote for his introduction &amp;agrave; la m&amp;eacute;thode de L&amp;eacute;onard de Vinci , looks back , not without sympathy despite the detachment , at the ideas and difficulties which he had had in 1894 , about the time of composition of the introduction . he excuses himself , so to speak , but does not really explain enough for our purposes . we are still left wondering why he should have had this absolute faith in the powers of technique and why therefore he believed , if only for a short time , that poetry can be composed without any trace of inspiration . the influence of Poe and Mallarm&amp;eacute; , and the part it played in Val&amp;eacute;ry &apos;s abandonment of poetry and the development of his programme of knowledge and self-knowledge , has been clearly indicated by Val&amp;eacute;ry himself and often discussed by his critics . less attention has been paid to an influence probably no less potent : that of contemporary scientific thought . the last three decades of the nineteenth century were an age in which , as the rift between philosophy and science widened , it was becoming evident that there was more than one reality , depending on the viewpoint of the observer . the scientist was cautious of claiming to interpret or explain phenomena : on the one hand , there was reality with its multiple facets , on the other , the man who sought to understand this reality . his understanding was necessarily subjective , but hope lay in his attempt to capture the manifold aspects of this reality . in fact , reality as such had no meaning : it is we who supply the meaning . the upshot of these tendencies of enlightened positivism was that the scientist avoided any metaphysical claims for his discoveries ( similarly , Val&amp;eacute;ry had rejected philosophy , metaphysics , any form of absolute in the normal sense ) : he sought a limited goal , continuity , by establishing relationships between phenomena . Henri Poincar&amp;eacute; probably played a decisive r&amp;ocirc;le in causing Val&amp;eacute;ry to shift his attention from objects in themselves to the relationships existing between objects , in which alone is any meaning to be found . thanks to his purely personal preoccupations ( his cult of consciousness , together with his reaction against love and poetry , les choses vagues generally ) , thanks to the influence of Mallarm&amp;eacute; &apos;s formalism , Val&amp;eacute;ry was already by the early 1890s well along the road of relations as opposed to objects in themselves . marked similarities of attitude can be discovered between the views of Poincar&amp;eacute; and Val&amp;eacute;ry on intellectual creation , both poetic and scientific . Val&amp;eacute;ry writes in 1919 : toutes choses se substituent , - ne serait-ce pas la d&amp;eacute;finition des choses ? and , in 1944 , looking back to his youth : the young Val&amp;eacute;ry is interested in the esprit universel , da Vinci or Napoleon , whose supreme secret est et ne peut &amp;ecirc;tre que dans les relations qu&apos;ils trouv&amp;egrave;rent , - qu&apos;ils furent forc&amp;eacute;s de trouver , - entre des choses dont nous &amp;eacute;chappe la loi de continuit&amp;eacute; . Val&amp;eacute;ry is drawn by the rigour and the universality of mathematics and of positivistic science generally towards the end of the nineteenth century . his da Vinci of the introduction , his Monsieur Teste , are animated by a central belief in the continu ; his attitude before 1900 , and even long after that date , like that of Poincar&amp;eacute; , rests on the postulate that we can not yet explain all the relations between all phenomena , but that we shall be able to do so eventually . the da Vinci of the introduction believes that our inability to see everything minutely and clearly is due merely to the infirmity of our senses ; such was Clerk Maxwell &apos;s point of view , as exemplified by his imaginary demon who could perform various fantastic tasks beyond the powers of ordinary men . the function of the universal mind is to transform discontinu into continu , and there is a tacit assumption that if this process can be continued , all the elements which do not fit in with what we already know , all the discontinu , past , present or future , will be transformed into continu . Maxwell &apos;s demon is essentially the same monster as Val&amp;eacute;ry &apos;s da Vinci - a projection to the infinite of their positivistic belief in rapports and the possibility of explaining the relationships between everything . Maxwell &apos;s demon and Val&amp;eacute;ry &apos;s da Vinci ( or Teste ) are what Poincar&amp;eacute; , Maxwell and Val&amp;eacute;ry wanted to be , hoped to be - the universal mind . this Maxwell- Poincar&amp;eacute;- Val&amp;eacute;ry relationship becomes all the more understandable if we remember that Poincar&amp;eacute; , naturally , was well acquainted with the work of Maxwell , and Val&amp;eacute;ry acquainted with the work of both Poincar&amp;eacute; and Maxwell . so we see how Val&amp;eacute;ry came to transfer his interests and hopes from poetic creation to this positivistic ideal of universal knowledge . with a youthful enthusiasm and impatience which he later acknowledged in the note et digression of 1919 , he fathoms , as he thinks , le probl&amp;egrave;me litt&amp;eacute;raire in the way we have seen , and more or less abandons poetic composition : Poe and Mallarm&amp;eacute; had , in a sense , led him in the same direction as Poincar&amp;eacute; . he is strong in his belief that there is une sorte de contraste entre l&apos;exercice de la litt&amp;eacute;rature et la poursuite d&apos;une certaine rigueur et d&apos;une enti&amp;egrave;re sinc&amp;eacute;rit&amp;eacute; de la pens&amp;eacute;e . 