Saint-John Perse (1887–1975,) alias of Marie-René-Auguste-Aléxis Saint-Léger Léger, was a French poet and diplomat. He was conferred the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry.”
Born in Saint-Léger-les-Feuilles, an island near Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, Perse studied at Bordeaux. After many adventures in New Guinea and a voyage in a skiff along the China coast, he enrolled in the French foreign ministry in 1904. He became Secretary-General in 1933, was dismissed in 1940, and fled to the USA, where he became an adviser on French affairs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Vichy government burned Perse’s writings and denied him French citizenship, but it was reestablished in 1945.
Symbolism influenced Perse’s earliest verse, and his blank verse employs a lexicon of rare words. His best-known works include the long poem Anabase (1924; Anabasis, translated by T. S. Eliot, 1930,) Exil (1942, ‘Exile,’) Pluies (1944, ‘Rain,’) Amers (1957; Seamarks, 1958,) and Chronique (1960; Chronique, 1961.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Saint-John Perse
The only menace is inertia.
—Saint-John Perse
Topics: Inaction, Boredom, Procrastination, Laziness, Getting Going
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