SOURCE: "The Language of Flowers in Senghor's Lettres d'Hivernage," in French Studies in Honor of Philip A. Wadsworth, edited by Donald W. Tappan and William A. Mould, Summa Publications, 1985, pp. 29-39.

In the following essay, Spleth delineates the function of the flower imagery found in Senghor's poetry collection.

Published in 1973, Lettres d'Hivernage constituted a new phase in Senghor's poetic career which had hitherto been dominated by works that, on some level at least, carried a strong political or cultural message. Every previous collection illustrated various facets of the writer's theory of Negritude or recounted one of the stages in Africa's postwar identity crisis. In Lettres, however, the dominant inspiration is the poet's love for a woman, and, while not entirely abandoning the familiar dichotomies of black and white or African and European, he relegates the social issues to the background and concentrates instead on the expression of emotions...