"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well"
About this Quote
Valery’s line is a dare disguised as a lament: the most necessary truths are the ones language is least equipped to carry. It lands because it refuses the comforting idea that poetry is a special dialect where feeling becomes effortlessly “expressed.” For Valery, poetry is an extreme sport of precision, and necessity is the enemy of ease. The moment something “must be said” - grief, desire, terror, the raw fact of being alive - it becomes overdetermined. Cliche crowds in. Sentimentality offers shortcuts. The poet is trapped between urgency and inadequacy, trying to thread a needle with shaking hands.
The subtext is also a critique of rhetorical certainty. Prose can pretend to settle things; it can declare, argue, explain. Poetry, in Valery’s modernist worldview, knows that the highest-stakes material resists closure. “Almost impossible” is doing pointed work here: not a romantic sigh about ineffability, but a technical diagnosis. The closer you get to what matters, the more each word’s weight, sound, and history threatens to distort the message. Poetry becomes less about stating and more about calibrating - arranging pressures, pauses, and echoes so the unsayable can be felt without being flattened.
Context matters: Valery wrote in the wake of Symbolism and alongside early modernism, when faith in transparent language was collapsing under psychology, abstraction, and war. His remark champions craft over confession, and it quietly warns against art that confuses urgency with truth. The “must” is ethical, not just emotional; the failure to say it well isn’t aesthetic embarrassment, it’s a human risk.
The subtext is also a critique of rhetorical certainty. Prose can pretend to settle things; it can declare, argue, explain. Poetry, in Valery’s modernist worldview, knows that the highest-stakes material resists closure. “Almost impossible” is doing pointed work here: not a romantic sigh about ineffability, but a technical diagnosis. The closer you get to what matters, the more each word’s weight, sound, and history threatens to distort the message. Poetry becomes less about stating and more about calibrating - arranging pressures, pauses, and echoes so the unsayable can be felt without being flattened.
Context matters: Valery wrote in the wake of Symbolism and alongside early modernism, when faith in transparent language was collapsing under psychology, abstraction, and war. His remark champions craft over confession, and it quietly warns against art that confuses urgency with truth. The “must” is ethical, not just emotional; the failure to say it well isn’t aesthetic embarrassment, it’s a human risk.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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