SOURCE: "St.-John Perse: Poet of the Marvellous," in Encounter, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, October, 1967, pp. 51-61.

In the following essay, Raine explores the defining characteristics of Léger's verse.

In conversation the author of the poems published under the pseudonym St.-John Perse once said to me what a pity it was that whereas up to the beginning of the last war English and French poets knew one another's work as a matter of course, this was no longer so. The context of St.-John Perse's poetry is by no means limited by the language in which he writes. His earliest master was Conrad, whom as a young man he knew intimately, and who introduced him also to W. H. Hudson and his writings; one of his earliest poems (Images à Crusoe) is an evocation of Defoe's hero by a poet whose boyhood was lived in the tropical archipelago...