French poet and diplomat, who used the pseudonym Saint-John Perse to keep his literary activity private. Perse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. He has been called the embodiment of the French national spirit and also a poet's poet for his emphasis on formal perfection and self-conscious way of choosing his words. Perse's oracular poetry was written in long lines that look like prose but have a delicate musical quality.

For it was such a long time that he had nursed a taste for this poem; having for it such a vocation . . . And it was such a sweetness, one evening, to give his devotion to it; and to yield to it; such impatience. And with such a smile also did he join allegiance with it . . . "My last song! my last song! which will be song of a man of the sea . . ."
('And You, Seas . . .' in Seamarks by St.-John Perse, bilingual edition, translation by Wallace Fowlie, New York: Bollingen Foundation, third printing, with corrections and enlarged bibliography, 1964, p. 17)

Marie René Auguste Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse) was born on St Léger des Feuilles, a small family-owned coral island in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe. His father, Amédée Léger, was a lawyer; he died suddenly and prematurely in 1907. The family of Perse's mother were plantation owners.

The first 10 years of his life Perse spent in and around Guadeloupe. He learned to sail when still very young. Jules Verne was one of his favorite childhood writers. As a result of the economic and social crisis in the islands, the family moved in 1899 to France, where they settled in the resert town of Pau. Perse attended the local lycée and then studied at the University of Bordeaux law, philosophy, classics, anthropology, and science, graduating in 1910. A poem written in Pau, 'Des Villes sur Trois Modes,' apperared in the review of Pan in the July-August 1908 issue. The piece was full of errors and Perse never authorized any subsequent reprinting of it. Nevertheless, it is Perse's earliest published poem.

Images à Crusoé (1909, Pictures for Crusoe), Perse's first published collection, lets the famous shipwrecked sailor lament the loss of his paradise when he is finally returned to civilization. To survive, Crusoe recreated a semblance of his former world – he cannot be even a servant. Perse's nine poems recreate the tropical island, similar to that of his childhood which he left behind. "O Despoiled! / You wept to remember the surf in the moonlight; the whistlings of the more distant shores; the strange music that is born and is muffled under the folded wing of the night, / like the linked circles that are the waves of a conch, or the amplifications of the clamors under the sea. . . ." (Selected Poems by Saint-John Perse, edited by Mary Ann Caws, New York: New Directions Books, 1982, p. 3)

Éloges (1910, Praises) appeared under the name "Saint-Léger Léger." Its poems, which celebrate his Antillean paradise, drew the attention of André Gide, among others. In 'Pour fêter une enfance' (To Celebrate a Childhood) Perse recalled palms, curved roots, radiance, naming each thing, servants, green insects, flies. "Plains, Slopes! There / was greater order! And everything was glimmering realms and frontiers of lights. And shade and light in those days were more nearly the same thing." ('To Celebrate a Childhood,' in Collected Poems by St.-John Perse, with translations by W.H. Auden, Hugh Chisholm, Denis Devlin, T.S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Wallace Fowlie, Richard Howard, Louise Varèse,  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 25)

At the age of 27 Perse entered diplomatic corps, serving in this profession under the name Alexis Léger. From 1916 to 1921 he was stationed in China, gripped by civil war. "The crisis will go on for a very long time in this country where so many small regional military autocracies are still in existence," he predicted in a letter to his mother. (Letters by St.-John Perse, translated and edited by Arthur J. Knodel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 309) Perse was Secretyary of the Diplomatic Corps and Secretary of the Association of Allied Minister. After the coup d'état of 1917 by General Zhang Xun, Perse participated in the evacuation of President Li Yuan-hong's family.

In 1921 Perse returned to Paris with a bunch of manuscripts. He did not feel entirely at home. Anabase (Anabasis), published in book-form in 1924, had been composed in a "small unused Taoist temple" as he said. The epic is recited by a nomad leader. ". . . So I haunted the City of your dreams, and I established in the desolate markets the pure commerce of my soul, among you / invisible and insistent as a fire of thorns in the gale." (Anabasis: A Poem by St.-J. Perse, with a translation into English by T. S. Eliot, London: Faber & Faber, 1930, p. 21) Its odysseian feelings can be found from the work of other diplomat-writers, among them Pablo Neruda and George Seferis.

Anabasis depicts some sort of military expedition of a conqueror to found a new city. It referred to the Anabasis of the Greek historian Xenophon and writer's own travels. "I believe that this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of Mr. James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle. And this is a high estimated indeed," Eliot wrote in the 'Preface'. (Ibid., p. 10) Although Perse composed many poems between 1924 and 1940, none was published. His pseudonym, St.-John Perse was perhaps taken from Persius, the Latin satiric poet.

From 1921 to 1932 Perse served as a secretary to the French statesman Aristide Briand, called the "Great Peacemaker", who had noted Perse's talents. His close association with Briand started in 1921 in Washington, where the poet was a delegate at the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments.

During the 1920s Perse was associated with Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, and the writers connected with the Nouvelle revue française. However, he avoided public participation in the activities of the literary scene. In 1933 Perse was appointed Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post he held until May 1940. He considered the Munich agreement of 1938, a treatly between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, a necessary evil.

After the Germans occupied France, he was dismissed from office by his own minister, Paul Reynaud. Behind the intrigues were Reynaud's mistress, the comtesse de Portes, who did not like Perse. He first fled to England, where he kept a distance from Charles de Gaulle, and then to the United States. As a revenge the Nazi secret police looted his Paris apartment, where they seized and destroyed several manuscripts, representing fifteen years of work.

In the new country Perse worked at the Library of Congress. He had a privately funded position as a consultant on French poetry. When de Gaulle invited him to London, Perse turned down the suggestion. During these years of exile Perse resumed writing poetry. His works darkened in tone – exile was for him a man's ever-present condition. This theme – with the images of barren sand and desolate beaches – came to the fore in Exil (1942), dedicated to Archibald Mac Leish, the Librarian of Congress. It has been described as one of the greatest works emerging from World War II. Perse wrote the work on the Long Beach Island, New Jersey. He said later in an interview that the poem was not about Resistance but about exile as an eternal human condition.

Pluies (1944), which took some of its rhythms from a tropical rainstorm, and Neiges (1945), inspited by a snowstorm in New York, were published in the Sewanee Review. With Poème à l'étrangère (1943) these poems have been grouped together in subsequent editions of Perse's work. From 1953 they have shared the common title Exil. 

Pluies was dedicated to Katherine and Francis Biddle, with whom he journeyed through the southern United States. Perse began writing this work during a sleepless night in Savannah, in the middle of an extraordinary storm. Carol Rigolot has argued that Pluies "evokes a whole tradition of American literature of the South, both in English and in French, and, perhaps most immediately, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind . . ." (Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse's Conversations with Culture by Carol Rigolot, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, pp. 106-107)

When thanking Jacqueline Kennedy in a letter from 1967 for retrieving a piece of iron grillwork from his grandparent's plantation Perse referred to the novel. In 1962 he had been a guest at Jacqueline Kennedy's state dinner for the Minister of Culture André Malraux. On Malraux's suggestion, the French government loaned Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, to the United States.

Also in Vents (1946) Perse used images from nature's forces, this time the winds. The poem gives a panoramic view into the discovery and exploitation of the New World, in which human action both destroys and creates in an almost ritualistic progress of history. He avoided straight ideological messages, but he was well aware of the modern poets role and asked in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "In these days of nuclear energy, can the earthenware lamp of the poet still suffice?—Yes, if its clay remind us of our own." (On Poetry, Speech of Acceptance Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Delivered in Stockholm, December 10, 1960. Translated By W.H. Auden with the French Text, New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1961, p. 12)

In 1967 Perse returned to his home country with his American wife, the former Dorothy Milburn Russell. Unhappy with the political atmosphere of France under General de Gaulle, he said that he welt more French in the U.S., wherekept also a residence. 

Amers (1957, Seamarks) was a long ode to the sea. Its section entitled 'Etroits sont les vaisseaux' (narrow are the vessels . . .) has been considered one of the great erotic sequences of French literature. At his death in 1975 Perse was grand officer of the Legion of Honour, a commander of the Order of Bath, and recipient of the Grand Cross of the British Empire. St.-John Perse died on September 20, 1975, in Giens. His papers and library are housed at the Fondation Saint-John Perse in the hôtel de ville of Aix-en-Provence.

"If one reads through all of the poems of St.-John Perse, one is immediately aware that each is, as it were, an installment of one great oeuvre. He is one of those fortunate poets who discovered both his vision and the proper linguistic means to express it quite early." ('A Song of life's power to renew; St.-John Perse's Sea Poem, Says Mr. Auden, Confirms His Claims for the Nobel Prize' by W.H. Auden, New York Times, July 27, 1958) Perse's pagan fascination with great forces of nature connects him with the tradition of Walt Whitman, although his aristocratic reservedness was far from Whitman's conception of poetic expression.

For further reading: Saint-John Perse, exil en lieu pur: étude du poème Exil by Leo Marguet (2022) Dictionnaire Saint-John Perse, sous la direction d'Henriette Levillain et de Catherine Mayaux (2019); Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant by Jean Khalfa (2017); Saint-John Perse by Henriette Levillain (2013); Orphan Narratives: the Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse by Valérie Loichot (2007); Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse's Conversations with Culture by Carol Rigolot (2001); The Prose Works by Saint-John Perse by Richard L. Sterling (1994); 'Perse, Saint-John,' in Nobel Prize Winners, edited by Tyler Wasson (1987); Under the Sign of Ambiguity: Saint John Perse - Alexis Leger by Erika Ostrovsky (1985); Saint-John Perse et la déouverte de l'être by Dan-Ion Nasta (1980); Les thèmesédeniques dans lœuvre de Saint-John Perse by Cécile Fournier (1976); Saint-John Perse by Roger Little (1973); Saint-John Perse by René M. Galand (1972); St.-John Perse: Praise and Presence by Pierre Emmanuel (1971); Saint-John Perse: A Study of His Poetry by Arthur Knodel (1966); Poétique de Sain-John Perse by Roger Caillois (1954) - Suom.: Suomennoksia kokoelmissa Tulisen järjen aika, toim. Aale Tynni (1962), Tuhat laulujen vuotta, toim. Aale Tynni (1976) ja 21 Nobel-runoilijaa, toim. Aale Tynni (1976).

Selected works:

• Images à Crusoé, 1909 (first published in La Nouvelle revue française)
  
• Éloges, 1911 (revised and corrected, 1925)
  - Éloges, and Other Poems (translated by Louise Varèse, 1944)
• Anabase, 1924 (revised and corrected, 1948)
  - Anabasis (translated by T.S. Eliot, 1930)
  - Anabasis (suom. Tuomas Anhava, Parnasso 8/1960)
• Amitié du Prince, 1924 (Friendship of the Prince)
• Poème pour Valery Larbaud, 1936
• Exil: poème, 1942
  - Exile, and Other Poems (translated by Denis Devlin, 1949) / Exil (edited by Roger Little, 1995)
• Poème à l'étrangère, 1943
• A Selection of Works for an Understanding of World Affairs Since 1914, 1943
• Pluies, 1943
  - Rains (translated by Denis Devlin, 1945)
• Neiges, 1943
  - Snows (translated by Denis Devlin, 1945)
• Quatre poèmes, 1941-1944, 1944 (as Exil, suivi de Poème à l'étrangère, Pluies, Neiges, 1945)
• Vents, 1946
  - Winds (translated by Hugh Chisholm, 1953)
• Œuvre Poétique: 1: Éloges. La gloire des rois, 1953 (rev.ed., 1960)
• Exile and Other Poems, 1953 (translated by Denis Devlin)
  
• Amers, 1957
  - Seamarks (translated by Wallace Fowlie, 1958)
• Chronoque, 1959
  - Chronique (translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1961)
• Poésie: allocution au Banquet Nobel du 10 décembre 1960, 1961
  - On Poetry (translated by W. H. Auden, 1961)
• Hommage à Rabindranath Tagore, 1962
• L'ordre des oiseaux, 1962 (Oiseaux, 1962)
  - Birds (translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1966; J. Roger Little, 1967; a version by Derek Mahon, 2002)
• Au souvenir de Valery Larbaud, 1963
• Silence pour Claudel, 1963
• Pour Dante, 1965
• Two Addresses, 1966 (On Poetry, translated by W. H. Auden; Dante, translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
• Chanté par celle qui fut là ..., 1969
• Collected Poems, 1971 (translated by W. H. Auden et al.)
• Œuvres Complètes, 1972
• Chant pour un équinoxe, 1975
  - Song for an Equinox (translated by Richard Howard, 1977)
• St. John Perse: Letters, 1979 (translated and edited by Arthur J. Knodel)
• Selected Poems, 1982 (edited by Mary Ann Caws)
• Under the Sign of Ambiguity: Saint John Perse, 1986 (reprint edition)
• Alexis Leger-Dag Hammarsjköld Correspondance, 1955-1961, 1993
  - The Poet and the Diplomat: The Correspondence of Dag Hammarskjold and Alexis Leger, 2001 (translated by Marie-Noëlle Little and William C. Parker)
• Lettres à l'étrangère, 1987 (edited by Mauricette Berne)
• Correspondance: 1942-1945: Roger Caillois, Saint-John Perse, 1996 (edited by Joëlle Gardes Tamine)
• Courrier d'exil: Saint-John Perse et ses amis américains, 1940-1970, 2001 (edited by Carol Rigolot)
• Correspondance: 1942-1975 / Alain Bosquet, Saint-John Perse, 2004 (edited by Roger Little)
• Lettres atlantiques: Saint-John Perse, TS Eliot, Allen Tate, 1926-1970, 2006 (edited by Carol Rigolot)
• Correspondance: 1946-1954 / Saint-John Perse, Calouste Gulbenkian, 2013 (edited by Vasco Graça Moura)
  
• Lettres familiales, 1944-1957, 2015 (edited by Claude Thiébaut)
  
• Song for an Equinox, 2017 (translated by Richard Howard; originally published in 1977)