A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Paul Valéry’s remark reflects his lifelong preoccupation with revision, craft, and the limits of artistic “completion.” Valéry was famous for meticulous reworking of his poems and for theorizing poetic composition in essays and notebooks. The line is typically cited in discussions of modernist aesthetics and the writer’s workshop ethos: a poem can always be refined—sound, rhythm, image, and meaning can be adjusted indefinitely—so publication is less a moment of perfection than a practical decision to stop revising. The aphorism is often invoked to describe the tension between an artist’s ideal standards and the realities of deadlines, fatigue, or the need to move on.

Valéry’s remark captures a modernist sense of artistic process as essentially open-ended. A poem, in this view, is not a problem with a single correct solution but a field of choices—tone, rhythm, diction, structure—each revision creating new possibilities and new dissatisfactions. “Finished” would imply an objective endpoint, yet the poet can always refine, rearrange, or rethink. What stops revision is usually external: deadlines, publication, fatigue, or the writer’s decision to let the work go. The line also hints at perfectionism’s double edge: the pursuit of the ideal can deepen craft, but it can also make completion psychologically impossible.

A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.
A work is never completed, only abandoned.
A poem is never completed, only abandoned.