Alan Williamson: A Forgotten Modernist: St-John Perse (July 2006)

The French poet St.-John Perse was an international celebrity when he won the Nobel Prize in 1960, so why, asks Alan Williamson, is he almost never read today? Williamson sees in Perse a lost Whitmanesque strain in Modernism, one of plenitude rather than deconstructive self-cancellation. Williamson introduces us to Perse’s work, focusing on his collection Rains, and exploring what he calls the “indescribably delicate” balance in the poems between self-contempt and a kind of expansive, “reverent freshness.”