SOURCE: "Saint-John Perse's Quest," in Climate of Violence: The French Literary Tradition from Baudelaire to the Present, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 87-101.

In the following essay, Fowlie provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Amers.

Abruptly, with the announcement in the late fall of 1960 that Saint-John Perse had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the work of a relatively obscure poet became a public concern. The work itself had been previously scrutinized and studied only by that small public that is devoted to the cause of poetry and aware of the poetic ambitions of our age, although to a wider public the name of Saint-John Perse was known, as were the few biographical details that have been rehearsed so often in print: the birth of Alexis Léger on a coral island near Guadeloupe in 1887, his education in France, his choice of the diplomatic service in 1914, his sojourn of...