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