Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
Ego, Prince of Id
By John Weightman
St. John Perse: Letters
translated and edited by Arthur J. Knodel
Bollingen Series LXXXVII: 2 Princeton University Press, 719 pp., $20.00
All poets are mysterious, in the sense that they themselves are never sure about their creative impulse. But some are relatively easy to get the feel of as personalities, from outside, and their work appears as a natural extension of their being. Not so, at least not so at first sight, with Marie-René Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, whose pen name, Saint-John Perse (Perse is the French form of Persius) seems highly significant in its haughty, enigmatic, English-cum-Latin remoteness.
Review, 3067 words
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