Éloges, and Other Poems by Saint-John Perse

First published:Éloges, 1911 (English translation, 1944)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, who wrote under the name of Saint-John Perse, was born in Guadeloupe and had a long and very distinguished career in both the prewar and postwar French diplomatic service. He thus represents that peculiarly French combination of the public servant and the man of letters. Though his Anabase (1924; Anabasis, 1930) was translated by so famous a writer as T. S. Eliot, he remained little known outside Europe. It is improbable that his work will ever achieve any wide degree of popularity; nevertheless, because of his marked influence on twentieth century poetry, he remains an important figure.

“Pictures for Crusoe,” the earliest of the poems included in the volume, should be read first; they are the clearest and, once understood, provide a sort of key to the other sections. In them, the reader is made immediately aware of the author’s childhood spent in the tropics; there is a succession of luxuriant images from the island left behind by Robinson Crusoe and the expression of nostalgia for clean wind, sea, and sand, and for the brilliant colors of dawn and sunset. It is the theme of this series of short poems that Crusoe’s real disaster occurs when he returns to the cities of men and leaves forever the lost tropic island. Everything he brings with him, every symbol of the island—the goatskin parasol, the bow, the parrot—decays in the sour dirt of the city; the seed of the purple tropic flower that he plants will not grow; even Goodman Friday, as he steals from the larder, leers with eyes that have become sly and vicious. Crusoe weeps, remembering the surf, the moonlight, and other, distant shores.

The same theme of nostalgia, much less clearly stated, runs through the longer poems “To Celebrate a Childhood” and “Praises.” Here the poet tries to recapture, by the same device of a series of pictures, the lost world of a childhood against the background of violent contrasts of brilliant light and shining water and crowding vegetation. The lush images succeed one another with bewildering rapidity until the lost childhood is re-created. Indeed, the images are heaped with such profusion that the poems become almost cloying, like overripe fruit. There is a shift of emphasis here, for no longer is there a contrast between two worlds, the island and the city, but rather an almost total recall of both the beauty and the squalor of the tropics.

The second section of the book, “The Glory of Kings,” consists of four poems, two written in 1910 and two in 1924. These poems are much more obscure than those in the first section. In them, Perse seems to have moved from the background of his childhood in Guadeloupe to the world of some primitive people where nameless speakers address praises to their half-human, half-divine rulers—the queen, a mysterious sphinxlike creature, at once the queen and the mother; the prince, with his towering headdress, the healer and enchanter, keeping vigil. It may be that Perse is trying to express something of the spirit in which members of a primitive society identify themselves with their rulers, until the king becomes the symbol, indeed the very soul, of his people and is rejoiced in as such. By implication, this belief is set against the critical, questioning attitude of twentieth century human beings, shorn of reverence, cut off from “the sources of the spirit.” “The Glory of Kings” seems to develop further a theme that is already implicit in “Pictures for Crusoe,” the cult of the primitive that appears in the work of so many twentieth century writers.

Under the first pen name of their author, these early poems by Perse are referred to by Marcel Proust, who, in Sodome et Gomorrhe(1922; Cities of the Plain, 1927), gives an appreciation of them and an indication of the likely reaction of the average reader: Lying on the narrator’s bed is a book of the admirable but ambiguous poems of Saint-Léger Léger; Madame Celeste Albaret picks up the book and asks if he is sure that they are poems and not riddles. It is natural that Proust, preoccupied as he was with the evocation of the past in all of its subtle ramifications in time and place, would have delighted in a poet bent on the same task of recapturing the totality of the experiences of childhood—including the sights, the sounds, and the odors. Nor is it surprising that these pictures from the tropics, so different from the hothouse, artificial life that Proust knew, should, by their very contrast, have appealed to him.

However, by including the remark of Madame Celeste, so distressing to the narrator, Proust succinctly indicates the probable response of most readers of poetry who approach Perse for the first time. It cannot be denied that these poems make very difficult reading. Eliot, in his preface to his translation of Perse’s Anabasis, tries to defend the author against the charge of willful obscurity by claiming that their seeming obscurity results from the linkage of explanatory and connecting matter, not from incoherence. Eliot’s advice to the reader is to allow the images of the poem to fall into the memory with unquestioning acceptance, each contributing to a total effect that will be apparent at the end of the poem. It is an indication of the contribution that Perse makes to poetic technique that this analysis could equally well be applied to much of Eliot’s own work.

It is by means of sequences of images, abruptly shifting into one another, that Perse achieves his total effects. This aspect of his poetry elicited the special praise of Valéry Larbaud, who considers his descriptions far superior to those of François-Auguste-René Chateaubriand because they are concrete, exact, precise, and filled with meaning. The result is a blending of the ugly and the beautiful, the whole a passionate rendering of experience. In his descriptions Perse makes full use of a device so characteristic of contemporary poetry: the sudden juxtaposition of the so-called poetic and the deliberately ugly or grotesque. A coconut, tossed into the street, “diverts from the gutter/ the metallic splendor of the purple waters mottled with grease and urine, where soap weaves a spider’s web.” It is intriguing to consider that such lines were being written in France in 1910, at a time when English poetry was dominated by the Georgians.

Few modern poets so little known to the reading public have received from their fellow poets such high praise as has Perse. His work has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Romanian. Hugo von Hofmannsthal considered that a direct road leads from Arthur Rimbaud to the early work of Stefan George and to that of Perse. Larbaud maintained that between 1895 and 1925 perhaps a hundred poets appeared in France, of whom at least thirty would continue to be worthy of attention; of these thirty, only a few would survive. To both of these critics, Perse is valuable because of his attempt, through the manipulation of language and his brilliant descriptions, to revivify French lyricism. It may well be, however, that Perse will remain essentially a poets’ poet, important to other writers because of what they can learn from his method, rather than a poet for the general reader. It is no longer necessary for the poet to appeal to the community and the wider view. He may now appeal to himself and the urgencies of his private vision.

Bibliography

Galand, René. Saint-John Perse. New York: Twayne, 1972. Ideal for serious research. Discusses the themes, symbolism, and influences on Perse’s poetry in a systematic and chronological order. Includes a chronology of Perse’s life and an extensive bibliography.

Gallagher, Mary. “Seminal Praise: The Poetry of Saint-John Perse.” In An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, edited by Sam Haigh. New York: Berg, 1999. Analyzes the “highly complex connection” between the Caribbean and Perse’s poetry.

Little, Roger. Saint-John Perse. London: Athlone Press, 1973. Excellent discussion of the collected poems, extremely helpful for beginning a study of the poet. Includes chapters on Perse’s other writings and ways in which to interpret his poetry. Bibliography.

Loichot, Valérie. “Saint-John Perse’s Shipwrecked Plantation: Éloges.” In Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Analyzes how Éloges and other works of postslavery literature reflect the violence of plantation slavery.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. “Saint-John Perse: Discontinuities.” In Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Chronicles the lives of Perse and other French writers who spent World War II living in exile in New York City.

Ostrovsky, Erika. Under the Sign of Ambiguity: Saint-John Perse/Alexis Léger. New York: New York University Press, 1984. A chronological discussion of Perse’s life in relation to his poetry. Ostrovsky attempts to eliminate the ambiguities inherent in Perse’s poetry. Includes a bibliography.

Rigolot, Carol. Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse’s Conversations with Culture. Chapel Hill: Department of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina, 2001. Rigolot likens reading Perse’s poetry to “eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible.” She analyzes his use of dialogue in his poetry, focusing on his conversations with a range of historical figures. Chapter 1 focuses on Éloges.

Sterling, Richard L. The Prose Works of Saint-John Perse: Towards an Understanding of His Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. A good source for twentieth century French aesthetics, especially in relation to Perse’s poetry. Includes a good bibliography.