Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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Of all the poets who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the 1960 Nobel laureate Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is one of the least read today. It was only through the composers Elliott Carter and Kaija Saariaho, who have written music inspired by his poetry, that I discovered the man. Yet, he is a fascinating figure, whose poetric voice is completely unlike that of his peers in 20th-century France. Mary Ann Caws has done a great service here by assembling selections from all Perse's works, in authoritative translations by figures like T.S. Eliot and Robert Fitzgerald.

Saint-John Perse was the pen-name of Alexis Leger, who rose to the very top of the French foreign ministry before he was deprived of his French citizenship by the Vichy government in 1940 and sailed to America. A diplomat who had gone to exotic non-Western countries like China, Perse set much of his poetry in some kind of anonymous Oriental civilization that could have been Persia or Ur or Cilicia, with desert sands, agorae, and altars. The poetry after his residency in America, the bulk of his oeuvre, adds a persistent interest in exile as the natural state of man. Perse wrote no real short poems; all of his poems are very long and epic in scale.

Not only are Perse's poetic themes unusual, but the poetic language itself is remarkable indeed. While Perse often stuck to the alexandrine, the standard metre of French poetry, his mature poetry was generally formatted into paragraphs. The major sections of the poems are often delineated by repeated calls, as when in "Amers" (Seamarks) we find:

"Poésie pour accompagner la marche d'une récitation en l'honneur de la Mer. / Poésie pour assister le chant d'une marche au pourtour de la Mer. / Comme l'entreprise du tour d'autel et la gravitation du choeur au circuit de la strophe."

Perse's poetry is by no means flawless. I find the poem "Pluies" (Rains) something of a failure. Even in the very best poetry Perse often resorts to clumsy alliteration, as in "Exil" when one finds "O Manieur d'aigles par leus angles, et Nourrisseur de filles les plus aigres souns la plume de fer." Furthermore, I'm unhappy that Caws left out the one passage from "Amers" (beginning "Et vous, Mers...") that is probably the most talked-about of the poem. Nonetheless, Perse is an exciting poet that is unfairly neglected today. Consider getting Roger Little's guide Saint-John Perse alongside this.