Selected Poems

The French poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) succeeded, according to critic Roger Caillois, “in giving as a scene for his wholly spiritual chronicles a kind of supreme civilization, composed of the essence of those which history records and going beyond them in grandeur and majesty.” In this bilingual edition of the Selected Poems, editor Mary Ann Caws has assembled extracts from all his major works–Anabasis, Praises, Exile, Rains, Snows, Winds, Seamarks, Chronique, Birds, and Song for an Equinox, in translations by T. S. Eliot, Louise Varse, Denis Devlin, Hugh Chisholm, Wallace Fowlie, Robert Fitzgerald, and Richard Howard