Paul Valéry was this fascinating French intellectual who basically straddled two centuries and two completely different versions of himself. He started out as this promising young Symbolist poet in the 1890s, hung out with Mallarme and that whole crew and then just stopped writing poetry for, like, twenty years. Just quit. Went into this deep intellectual crisis and decided to focus on philosophy, mathematics, and consciousness instead. Then, in his forties, he came back to poetry and wrote some of the most celebrated French verse of the 20th century. The guy was a total polymath; he wrote about everything from art to science to politics. He’s known for being super precise, almost obsessive about language and thought, but also deeply skeptical about… well, everything, including his own work.