Customer Reviews (1)

An unusual figure that should be brought back to popular attention
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Entranced by this vision of life, adopting it...
Also, in love with "Amerse" (or "Seamarks")... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Saint-John Perse: praise and presence
The first 25 pages are a lecture delivered on December 2, 1968 under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. The balance of the book is a listing of his writings in the collection of the Library of Congress compiled by Ruth S. Fritag.
--- from book's card catalog notes. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A modern treasure!
The English edition of this book offers not only what is one of the most worthwhile pieces of poetry the 20th century has to offer to 21st century readers, but also a work that may serve as a standard to anyone looking to locate an example of a classic that survives the often deadly process of translation, for whom here we may thank T.S. Eliot, -- the edition prints the French language on the facing page, so that readers may trace what little poetic liberties the latter has taken in order to deliver across mountains and rivers, --resembling the nomadic journey of St.-John Perse's epique, -- of language-scapes crossed . . . Mr. Eliot deserves our esteem for this feat if nothing else, to have retained that essence of "a great principle of violence", or rather that "essence" of the journey described in thisbook which is really not so much one of plot, character, or any emotional developement in the specific sense, but one of a progression of language . . . certainly the distinction is difficult to articulate, I mean that one existing between the emotional evolution and the progression of language, FEELING, essence, -- but that is what is so worthwhile about this book, in fact fascinating, to me, because it describes exactly this very experience, -- in that it reads as a kind of separate history, it describes the essence of man in history apart from any historical reference, apart from any identification that makes what the book describes HUMAN at all . . . we see a man here that is not a man at all except anatomically, as we would in focusing on the ancient cultures of South and Central America (Chavin, Olmecs, etc.), Egypt, China, and so on, they are only men as we are men today by an anatomical relationship. Thus this book reveals to us a sense of being, as men, that is largely lost in our modern day, and in the form of purely pleasurable poetry . . . so many lines in this books seem to sum up the entire statement of the entire vision, as if they could easily exist alone in fragments, say when our own culture has long passed to the dust of a long time's ravaging, and say all that the book builds from those lines together. I highly recommend this book, not so much for my own reasons, which are certainly a crock of my own reflection, but for your own. This is a book that speaks, there are few that do so, it is a book one can hear without reading. Mr. Eliot called it "as important as the later works of James Joyce", -- I would never give it so unworthy a comparison as that, -- I mean that this book is simply CAPABLE of more, Joyce is one thing, but this book, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, can be so much more.In terms of history, this is a book worth digging up. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Modern Language Review, published by Modern Humanities Research Association on October 1, 2001. The length of the article is 586 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: La Creolite de Saint-John Perse.(Review)
Author: Martin Munro
Publication: The Modern Language Review (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2001
Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association
Volume: 96Issue: 4Page: 1098(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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