What is done easily is done without us

Now, this work, these researches, these struggles of the poet against the  stringent conditions I had set myself - and whose indirect importance so few people grasp - were never, I must say, wasted efforts. I made those hours of labor and tension yield everything they could possibly contain. The art of poetry is, happily, not an exact one. At every instant insurmountable problems confront one. A nothing - and a beautiful poem is shipwrecked, achievement compromised, the charm broken. The poet's brain is a sea-bottom on which many hulls repose.

But these desperate plights that all poets know are not always without their uses; it is a question of intelligence. After all, hasn't the observer in us learned something from this defeat ? What is done easily is done without us.

- from "Letter to a Friend" translated by Louise Varèse

in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry, New Directions, 1984.