Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse was the pen name of Alexis Leger, born in 1887 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, into a family of lawyers and planters long settled on the island. In 1899 the family moved to Pau in southwestern France, and the lost tropical world of his childhood became the matter of his first poems. He studied law in Bordeaux, came to know Francis Jammes and Paul Claudel, and published Éloges, a cycle of luminous recollections of the Antilles, with the encouragement of André Gide.

Leger entered the French diplomatic service in 1914 and kept his two lives rigorously apart. Posted to Peking, he wrote Anabasis, a long poem of a nomadic conqueror’s expedition across Asian deserts, published in 1924 under the name Saint-John Perse and later translated into English by T. S. Eliot. He then fell largely silent as a poet while rising to become secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry, one of the most powerful posts in French diplomacy. In 1940 he was dismissed, went into exile in the United States, and was stripped of his citizenship by the Vichy regime.

Banishment released a new outpouring. Supported by a post at the Library of Congress, he wrote Exile, Rains, Snows, Winds and Seamarks — long verse-paragraphs of ceremonial grandeur in which the sea, the wind and history’s migrations become figures of human renewal. His diction is rare and exact, drawn from natural history, navigation and ritual. He received the Nobel Prize in 1960, returned to live in France on the Giens peninsula, and died there in 1975.