Elogios

Nobel Prize in Literature 1960

French poet and diplomat, whose real name was Marie-René-Auguste-Aléxis Saint-Léger, was born on May 31, 1887, on the island of Saint-Léger des Feuilles. Coming from an ancestral French family that had settled in the Antilles in the 17th century, he was the son of a lawyer and the heiress of vast plantations, in whose veins ran Creole blood. When he was twelve years old, he accompanied his parents in their move to France, undertaken for economic reasons.
He studied at the seaside resort of Pau until completing secondary school, when he entered the University of Bordeaux, where he studied Law, Philosophy, Classical Studies, Anthropology and Natural Sciences, graduating in 1910.
Also that year he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled Praises (1910) and became a member of the diplomatic corps. He traveled extensively, serving a mission in China between 1916 and 1921, during which time he was gathering excerpts that appeared compiled in the volume Anabase, published in 1924, when he was already back in Paris. The work, of classical inspiration, was a long epic poem that described the founding of a city by a nomadic chief.
Between 1921 and 1932, he held the position of secretary in the service of Aristide Briand, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. In 1933 he was appointed Secretary-General of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but was eventually dismissed from his post in 1940, at the time of the occupation of the country by German troops.
Seeking refuge in England, he chose to cross the Atlantic and settle in the United States of America, where he worked as a consultant for the Library of Congress. He then published Exile (1942), a work that consolidated his reputation as a poet and which, as the title itself indicates, revolved around the idea of ​​exile.
After the publication of naturalist works such as Pluies (1944), Neiges (1945), Vents(1946), Amers (1957), Saint-John Perse became a full-time poet. In 1960 he appeared with Chronicle, having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year, and in 1962 came Birds.
Saint-John Perse died in Giens on September 20, 1975.

Saint-John Perse. In Infopédia [Online]. Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2011.