Book Description
Presented here in English translation are letters selected for publication by the poet himself, shortly before his death, from his wide correspondence with famous writers and public figures such as W. H. Auden, Francis and Katherine Biddle, Paul Claudel, Joseph Conrad, E. E. Cummings, Mina Curtiss, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Dag Hammarskjold, Archibald MacLeish, Jean Paulhan, Jacques Riviere, Igor Stravinsky, Allen Tate, and Paul Valery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Brief, but useful for the Perse beginner
Roger Little's survey SAINT-JOHN PERSE appeared in the Athlone French Poets series in 1973. Perse was to live for two years more, but as Little's book covers both the Gallimard volume of collected poems and the subsequently published work "Nocturne", it does cover the whole of Perse's poetic career. Perse is sadly a neglected poet, with very little written on him in English (and scarcely more available in French), so this Athlone guide is a fine resource for readers of Perse. Note that while Little writes in English, all quotations from Perse's poetry or the reactions of French critics are left in the original language, with no translation, so knowledge of French is essential.

The description of Perse's life and work is fairly light, and this is certainly meant more for the Perse neophyte than one involved in serious study of his poetry. The book opens with a biography of Alexis Leger, though this is little more than a chronological listing of his government positions and literary output. Little prefers to separate Perse the poet from Leger the diplomat and private citizen, and not only does he not inquire much into the events of Leger's personal life, but except for the matter of exile he never speaks of how matters in the poetry could derive from the poet's personal experience. This is rather a pity, and one still waits for a more probing biography of the man. The description of Perse's poetry ranges from the early "Eloges" to the final "Nocturne". This coverage is brief, with some books ("Oiseaux", "Nocturne") getting hardly a page, though "Amers" and "Anabasis" are appropriately given more coverage. Little speaks of the major themes and meaning behind each of the work, and gives some representative quotations.

Even if the description of the individual poems is meagre, Little nonetheless offers the very helpful chapter "An Approach to Perse", which removes much of the mystery that surrounds Perse's poetry and makes it daunting to new readers. Another chapter explores Perse's published correspondences and shows how it can serve as a poetics. The chapter "Points of View" contains quotations from French and English-speaking critics on Perse, and the bibliographical citations here can spur the reader on to more writing about the poet.

Little's survey is long out of print, but thankfully used copies abound, and are quite inexpensive. If you are an English-speaking reader intriguied by the poetry of Saint-John Perse, Little's guide is worth picking up. ... Read more

Book Description
According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where interlocutors are almost always reduced to anonymity. In this book, Rigolot analyzes the poet's multiple strategies of dialogue, capturing his conversations with a surprising range of people--from biblical figures and ancient Greek and Roman authors to artists as diverse as Dante and Shakespeare, Chateaubriand and Hugo, Audubon, Whitman, Poe, Baudelaire, Verne, Mallarmé, Gaughin, Rimbaud, Loti, Claudel, Valéry, Segalen, and Braque. ... Read more