Saint-John Perse, born in 1887, pseudonym for Alexis
Saint-Léger Léger, came from an old Bourguignon family which settled in the
French Antilles in the seventeenth century and returned to France at the end
of the nineteenth century. Perse studied law at Bordeaux and, after private
studies in political science, went into the diplomatic service in 1914.
There he had a brilliant career. He served first in the Peking embassy, and
later in the Foreign Office where he held top positions under Aristide
Briand and became its administrative head.
He left France for the United States in 1940 and was deprived of his
citizenship and possessions by the Vichy regime. From 1941 to 1945, he was
literary adviser to the Library of Congress. After the war he did not resume
his diplomatic career and, in 1950, retired officially with the title of
Ambassadeur de France. He has made the United States his permanent
residence.
His literary work was published partly under his own name, but chiefly under
the pseudonyms St. J. Perse and Saint-John Perse. After various poems that
reflect the impressions of his childhood, he wrote Anabase (Anabasis), 1924,
while in China. It is an epic poem which puzzled many critics and gave rise
to the suggestion that it could be understood better by an Asian than by a
Westerner. Much of his work was written after he settled in the United
States: Exil (Exile), 1942, in which man and poet merge and imagery and
diction are fully mastered; Poème l'Etrangère (Poem to a Foreign Lady),
1943; Pluies (Rains), 1943; Neiges (Snows), 1944; Vents (Winds), 1946, which
are the winds of war and peace that blow within as well as outside of man;
Amers (Seamarks), 1957, wherein the sea redounds as an image of the
timelessness of man; and his abstract epic, Chronique ( Chronicle), 1960.
This autobiography/biography was
written at the time of the award and later published in the book series
Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with
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