Background
Saint-John Perse was born on May 31, 1887 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. He was thr son of a lawyer.
Saint-John Perse was born on May 31, 1887 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. He was thr son of a lawyer.
Saint-John Perse received his higher education in France and entered the French foreign service in 1914, at which time he adopted the pen name of Saint-John Perse.
Saint-John Perse was accepted by the French Foreign Service in 1914 and spent the years from 1916 to 1921 in China.
After the defeat of the French armies, he left France for England and Canada, and then the United States where he obtained a consultantship in French poetry at the Library of Congress.
He remained in the U. S. until 1959.
His eventual return to France, after so many years, became almost an apotheosis.
Unlike Paul Claudel, he refused to pursue a career on two fronts or to let his diplomatic career show through his literary works.
It is a collection of youthful poems praising life and depicting the marvels of a tropical island.
Portions of the collection had been appearing since 1909 in the Nouvelle revue française.
Amitié du Prince (1921) took its inspiration from ancient sacerdotal sources. Anabase (Anabasis), written in China and published in 1924, is the saga of a great conqueror who founds a city, crosses a desert, and takes to the high seas.
Exil (Exile) appeared in 1944, after Perse had been relieved of his duties and deprived of French citizenship.
It led him into an expression of solidarity with his fellowmen and into a recognition of exile and instability as conditions of life.
The preoccupations of the poems published in the early 19406—Exile was followed by Rains and Snows—crystallized in Vents (Winds), a work of about 2, 500 lines that traces the genesis of the universe from its beginnings.
The wind represents many things during the course of this epic, but basically it suggests everlasting change and movement.
The sea, which was the subject of Perse's great work of the 19506, Amers (1957; Seamarks), stands for vastness, limitless space.
Together with its opposite, narrowness, it constitutes a polarity that, as a sort of life principle, inspires the poetic imagination.
He used a verse form of multiple cadences similar to the "verset" invented by Paul Claudel, and his tendency toward periphrase and allegory and his majestic images all suggested Claudel. Perse died on September 20, 1975, at his villa in Giens, on the French Riviera.
His substantial appeal to poets, including T. S. Eliot, and the wealth of praise accorded his work stand in sharp contrast to his creative output.
"Mr. Perse's productivity was minuscule, " wrote the New York Times, "he published only seven volumes, all genuinely slender. "
Saint-John Perse ranks among the greatest French poets of the 20th century.
His work is epic in nature, characterized by a cosmic vision and a lofty rhetoric.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960.
In 1958, Saint-John Perse married the American Dorothy Milburn Russell.
