Saint-John Perse
pseudonym of
Marie-René-Auguste-Aléxis Saint-Léger Léger
born May
31, 1887, Saint-Léger-les-Feuilles,
Guadeloupe
died Sept. 20, 1975, Presqu’île-de-Giens,
France
French poet
and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1960 “for the soaring
flight and evocative imagery of his poetry.”
He studied
at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris
and in 1914 entered the diplomatic service.
He went to China and was successively consul
at Shanghai and secretary at Peking. In 1921
he attended the Washington disarmament
conference as an expert on East Asian
affairs. He was later secretary (1921–32) to
the French statesman Aristide Briand. In
1933 he was appointed secretary-general at
the Foreign Ministry, with the rank of
ambassador. Dismissed from office in 1940
and deprived of French citizenship by the
Vichy government, he went to the United
States, where he worked as consultant on
French literature in the Library of
Congress. He returned to France in 1957.
Saint-John
Perse’s early poetry, published before his
diplomatic career began in earnest, includes
Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems),
which shows the influence of Symbolism; he
later developed a more personal style. The
language of his poetry, admired especially
by poets for its precision and purity, is
difficult, and he made little appeal to the
general public. His poetry has been compared
to that of Arthur Rimbaud. His hypnotic
vision is conveyed by a liturgical metre and
exotic words. The best-known early work is
the long poem Anabase (1924; Anabasis,
translated by T.S. Eliot). In the poems
written in exile—Exile (1942; Exile, and
Other Poems), Vents (1946; Winds), Amers
(1957; Seamarks), Chronique (1960), and
Oiseaux (1962; Birds)—he achieved a deeply
personal note. For some, Saint-John Perse is
the embodiment of the French national
spirit: intellectual yet passionate, deeply
conscious of the tragedy of life, a man of
affairs with an artist’s feeling for
perfection and symmetry. Among his
better-known poems translated into English
are “I have halted my horse by the tree of
the doves,” “And you, Seas,” and “Under the
bronze leaves a colt was foaled.”
