Article ID: 2023-B037
This article examines the concepts of expectation and surprise in the work of Paul Valéry, a French poet and critic. Valéry’s key idea is that “expectation and surprise” are a complementary pair of notions, and his reflections on “basic expectation” share some similarity with current neuroscientific perspectives on prediction. His theoretical considerations in Cahiers are inseparable from his poetics, and Valéry regards the composition of verse as “the creation of expectation.” While exploring his conception of poetry, we highlight the characteristics of Valéry’s “paradoxical surprise” by comparing it to Surrealist surprise. Finally, we focus on several poems from Valéry’s Charmes to analyze how expectations and surprises are created in poetic composition. This study shows that Valéry’s conception of a poem as an oscillation “between sound and sense” is associated with his view of expectation as “neither body nor mind but both of them together.”
