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His name, as Eliot remarked ten years ago, is known to everyone in America who is seriously concerned with contemporary poetry. And in Britain? Perhaps, as the author of a single book. But Perse, as the Nobel prize reminded us, has been writing for fifty years. To trace his development through these years is to see Anabase not just for the splendid poem that it is but as the centre of an achievement impressive in its consistency and scope.

     The debt of the early poems, directly as well as through Claudel, to Rimbaud, is significant. That the powerful personality of Claudel should have influenced a schoolboy hesitating between medicine and a diplomatic career is not surprising. But to have gone beyond the Cinq Grands Odes to Les Illuminations is the sign of an intelligence that has recognized its course. For Eloges has more in common with Rimbaud than an occasional rhythm or turn of phrase, more even than the reliance on ‘l’enfance irréfutable’. It has a force and audacity of language, not indeed imitative, but sustained by that faith in the poetic imagination that the work of Rimbaud had affirmed. And this is not a submission to Rimbaud but the discovery of an affinity.

     The title of this first volume — it includes the earlier Images à Crusoe and Pour Fêter Une Enfance as well as the eighteen lyrics themselves grouped as Eloges — defines the mode of the poems. They are poems of praise: praise of the world of the senses, praise of energy. Their vividness is remarkable. The beauty of the tropics, the squalor of Bordeaux, are seen with equal intensity. There is no self-pity; the poetry is hard, clean, objective. (The emotion of Pour Fêter Une Enfance is not nostalgia but gratitude.) And already the themes and images are Perse’s own: sea and voyage, trader in mules and oxen, insects, salt, sweat, the splendour of pure linen. There are phrases that will be echoed nearly twenty years later in Anabase, forty years later in Exit, Pluies, Vents:

Et d’autres bêtes qui sont douces, attentives
au soir, chantent un chant plus pur que l’annonce
des pluies                               (Images à Crusoe).

Un soir de longues pluies en marche vers la vile
                                              (Images à Crusoe).

     There is a hint of the hieratic tone that is to characterize the later poems. In Images à Crusoe, and notably in Eloges, rhythm and diction are fairly close to speech. But the tone of Pour Fêter Une Enfance is more exalted:

(Je parle d’une haute condition, alors, entre les robes, au règne de tournantes clartés.)

     The adoption of this tone is an affirmation of value. For the poem is a recollection not only of a simpler, more exotic world, but of a world in which there was more order. The gratitude is not of the senses only, for the seas and skies of the Antilles of his childhood, but of the mind: for the dignity of the servant girls (‘grandes filles luisantes’), for the gravity of his beautiful mother and ‘mon père qui fut noble et decent’, for the quiet strength of the uncles tying their horses at the gate of the house. The eighteen Eloges written the following year do not leave childhood behind; rather they carry it intact, understood and valued, into a world disordered and corrupt.

     The Eloges volume appeared in 1911; and for ten years Perse published nothing. Appointed to the embassy in Pekin which Claudel had left five years before, he travelled in China and Mongolia, in Japan, the Malayan archipelago, the Polynesian islands. In 1921 he returned to France with several poems which he intended to publish only after his retirement from public life. At the instance of Jacques Rivière, and apparently of Gide and Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue and Valéry Larbaud, however, he agreed to print one of these poems. The first and final Songs of Anabase appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française and Intentions in April and November 1922, the complete poem in the N.R.F. in 1924. Amitié du Prince, which appeared in the same year, was added to a new edition of Eloges in 1925.

     To meet Amitié du Prince at the end of the Eloges volume is to recognize how far Perse has travelled. It is in every way firmer, more mature, than the early work. The material is no longer sensuous and emotional experience, but moral. And though the central image is a quest, a journey, it is a quest not only for the strength of self-mastery but for a social order:

Les hommes de basse civilisation errent dans les montagnes. Et le pays est gouverné...

The poem is evidently a preliminary sketch for Anabase; and the greater poem is a reminder of what Amitié du Prince lacks: space, movement, perspective in time, a sense of the hero as leader of a whole community. (The references to the Prince’s people and to the Traveller’s convoy are too slight to carry conviction.)

     Of Anabase, Perse’s masterpiece, the distinctive feature has been noted by Lucien Fabre: its union of two kinds of poetry apparently incompatible, epic and lyric. That epic should be written in this century is surprising enough (the Cantos of Pound are lyric, interspersed with stretches of narrative and didactic exposition). That epic and lyric should be held in a single poem is more remarkable. Yet held they are, in the consciousness of the central figure, the warrior-prince: a man of critical intelligence, aware of his own desires, aware of the desires of those he leads, and sharply, even humorously, conscious of the diversity of these desires. The poem presents the migrations of a primitive people, but also the migrations of a mature imagination: of a leader now at one with his people (parmi nous), now aware of his solitude among them (parmi vous). It is a poem not of power, though the imagery of power is impressive, but of exploration. Moreover, it deals not only with migration and conquest but with the founding of the city — and this not perfunctorily but with an evident delight in order. One of the principal themes at the opening of the poem (‘la chose publique sur de justes balances’), this is developed in sections III and IV and orchestrated fully in the final section with its enumeration of ritual ceremonies and of the trades and occupations of men.

     The arrangement of the ten sections is narrative; there are anticipations, hesitations, reversals of mood. But within each section the writing is lyrical, meditative and dramatic. Bold ellipses, which bring the material within less than thirty pages, give the poem additional force. ‘The justification of such abbreviation of method,’ as Eliot remarks, ‘is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization.’ (The paradox hinted in these last two words is a pointer to the scope and vigour of the poem.) But this impression contains a wider variety of tone than at first appears. The interest in civic affairs has a patrician, almost quizzical, detachment that Eliot was to adopt a little later in the Coriolan poems. And the exact, acrid notation of the physical at the beginning of the fourth and end of the ninth sections hardens and heightens the splendour of the poem as a whole.

     This splendour, as so often with Perse, is in images of unusual clarity and precision — as in the lines that Eliot finely translates in the closing Song:

And not that a man be not sad, but arising before day and biding circumspectly in the communion of an old tree, leaning his chin on the last fading star, he beholds at the end of the fasting sky great things and pure that unfold to delight.

Imagery, vivid and profuse in the early poems, sparse in Amitié du Prince, is in Anabase disciplined, deployed to advance and integrate the poem.

     The silence Perse imposed on himself after Anabase was broken only when the fall of France in 1940 brought his diplomatic career abruptly to an end. A number of poems in manuscript were destroyed when his Paris flat was searched by the Gestapo. Perse himself escaped to America, where Exil, Pluies, and the less important Poème à L’Etrangère and Neiges were written during the war; in 1945 these were collected in one volume under the general title Exil. The two longer poems, Vents and Amers (Seamarks), appeared in 1946 and 1957, and Chronique in 1960.

     The voice is now that of the Poet, with his singing robes about him: a figure glimpsed (as the Storyteller) on the outskirts of Eloges and Anabase, who henceforth stations himself at the centre of each of Perse’s major poems. The dangers of this position are apparent: the temptation to a strident rhetoric, the exclusion or distortion of experiences that the high style can do nothing with, a rejection of the syntax and rhythms of speech and, in consequence, a gradual stiffening of movement and encrusting of the poem’s surface with ornament.

     Exil is reasonably free of these vices. Yet the increased reliance on repetition and anaphora (the arrangement of clauses in parallel) is noticeable. The savage incisiveness of Anabase has given way to phrases more arresting than exact. The rhythms, except for the catalogue in section IV (twice as long as the comparable catalogue in Anabase) are declamatory. And the poem is not more personal only but more subjective. The writing of the poem has become, in fact, the subject of the poem. Only the firmness with which this is grasped, the resolution with which this writing is explicitly claimed as moral action, saves the deliberately vatic style from sounding too self-conscious.

     Pluies is a less precarious success. The most freely lyrical of the later poems, it is also the one major poem of Perse that approximates to a regular structure — each section except the seventh and ninth being disposed in five stanzas each of three lines (varying in length from twelve to thirty or more syllables). The strength of the poem is the strength of the passion which informs and moulds this structure. Only the direct appeal to the rains, which should he the climax of the poem, seems forced.

     And Vents? The most ambitious of the later poems, certainly: four cantos, each as long as Anabase, their theme the end of an age and the need for new life.

     The poem opens exultantly; and throughout the first Canto the imagery of winds and migrations, the rhythms of impatience, movement, renovation, are impressive. There is an arrogance that again recalls Rimbaud:

Nous avançons mieux nos affaires par la violence et par l’intolérance.
La condition des morts n’est point notre souci, ni celle du failli.
L’intempérance est notre règle, l’acrimonie du sang notre bien-être.

     The second and third Cantos offer a single image of discovery — the American continent: the vast, half-tamed spaces of the West and South, the successive invaders and explorers, Spaniard, Puritan, Mormon. But the drive westward is a drive, finally, to death:

Et au-delà, et au-delá, qu’est-il rien d’autre que toi-même? — qu’est-il rien d’autre que d’humain? ... Minuit en mer après Midi... Et l’homme seul comme un gnomon sun la table des eaux . . . Et les capsules de la mort éclatent dans sa bouche.

     We are to return; but not to the bourgeois culture of Europe, pieced together from the fragments of dead civilizations. The wind must still be with us. ‘We had a rendezvous with the end of an age. Do we find ourselves with men of another age?’

     The sheer bulk of the poem is formidable. Yet epic, the judgement of Claudel notwithstanding, it is not. Apparently a poem of wider scope than Anabase, it is in fact more limited. The values implied are personal, the references to the remaking of society hardly more than gestures. Nowhere is it made convincingly clear, as in Anabase, that the building of cities is worthwhile, that to live at the limit of one’s energies is not enough. The development of the central theme is sluggish and erratic. The rhythms are insistently, monotonously dithyrambic, the same patterns piling up again and again in massive waves of sound. There are indeed striking lines, but these are squandered in endless amplification. A gigantic lyric, such power as the poem has comes not, as in Anabase, from the impact of phrase and image, but from the cumulative, tidal weight of exclamation and apostrophe, repetition, anaphora, alliteration, rhyme and assonance. (In English, with the thinning of the verbal texture, the resemblance to Whitman is occasionally fairly close.)

     A minor weakness of the poem is its occasional recourse to periphrasis to bring the life of a modern city within the limited tonal range of Perse’s later style. The refusal to engage such recalcitrant material contributes significantly to the success of the poem which followed.

     Amers, a triumphal ode in praise of the sea, is on the same huge scale as Vents. The structure — Invocation, Strophe (in nine Cantos), Chorus, Dedication — appears somewhat arbitrary; there seems no particular reason, at least, for the order in which the first eight Cantos of the Strophe are arranged. As in Vents, imagery is used to enrich rather than to define. The rhythm, however, is in general less declamatory, the rhetoric less obtrusive. And three sections at least, the third and final Cantos of the Strophe and the closing Dedication, are remarkable. In the final Canto of the Strophe — a dialogue which reaches to the climax of the sexual act and beyond it — amplification is in place, to create the richness and variety of the experience of love by relating it to images of night, of the sea, of the natural, fertile world. The sustained intensity of metaphor is astonishing. This is the strength also of the third Canto, an evocation of the splendour of Greek tragedy that pleads for the renewal of ant and human dignity by the energy of nature (the sea): a passage as vivid and compact as anything Perse has written.

     Amers is praise, éloge. And this return to the mode of the early poems is the completion of a circle that has taken in the journey to maturity, the experiences of a life of responsible action, and the rise and decay of civilizations travelled through, examined, pondered, valued. For Claudel, praise means praise of the created world as a manifestation of its creator; for Perse, praise of the earth as itself creative and of man ‘honoured by death’ as the architect of civilizations nourished by the earth:

Et contre la mort elle-même, n’est-il que de créer?

     It is the acceptance, the affirmation, of death that gives Amers its dignity. Yet the final verses of the poem, the Dedication, present the homage of man, aware of his mortality, to the undying vigour of the sea. And this conviction that the human spirit by accepting death transcends it is developed in Chronique. The vocabulary is as exotic, the tone as aristocratic, as ever. The arrogance, and with it the insistent rhetoric, of the longer poems has gone; the writing is sure, lyrical, contemplative. Yet even where the emotion is most poignantly elegiac the cadences, no less than the imagery and phrasing, have the vitality that the poem acclaims.

     This vitality is at the centre of Perse’s work. If the winds of destruction, invoked as early as Anabase —

Un grand principe de violence commandait à nos moeurs

— are needed, the admiration is not for violence but for energy, élan. ‘La poésie pour moi,’ he has written, ‘est avant tout mouvement.’ Images of movement are everywhere in Perse:

Au bruit des grandes eaux en marche sur la terre, tout le sel de la terre tressaille dans les songes.                     (Anabase).

Et comme un haut fait d’armes en manche par le monde, comme un dénombrement de peuples en exode...      (Exil).

Soeurs des guerriers d’Assur furent les hautes Pluies en marche sur la terre.                                              (Pluies).

     The admiration is for energy, and specifically for the energy that creates order: for the marking out of boundaries, for rite and ceremony, liturgies, laws, institutions, the professions of men. Perse’s concern for language is a concern not only for precision in his poetry but for the convention of speech that makes civilization possible; a concern, in a wider sense than Mallarmé intended, for the language of the tribe:

Ainsi la vile fut fondée et placée au matin sous les labiales d’un nom pur.                                                      (Anabase).

     It is not an accident that in Anabase the catalogue of the ways and conditions of men reaches its climax with the appearance of the Poet, the Storyteller who knows them all, their genealogies and histories, and who sees ‘over and above the actions of men on the earth, many omens on the way, many seeds on the way’. Poetry for Perse is celebration: of irrefutable childhood, of the natural world, of the achievement of civilization. Hence the Poet, articulating the deepest impulses of men, to praise and reverence, is sacred; and his language not that of the market-place but of the temple:

Un pur langage sans office.                                   (Exil).

     The dangers of such a language have been noticed. That Perse so frequently rises above these dangers is due partly to the force of his imagery and the momentum of his rhythms, partly to the tradition of rhetorical strength in the written language. (Racine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Claudel, Valéry, Montherlant.) To read the hundred pages of Vents is to murmur again, ‘Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou.’ But for the scrupulous precision of Eloges and Anabase, for the controlled vehemence of Pluies (and of the first Canto of Vents), for the nobility of certain pages of Amers and Chronique, we should be grateful.