SOURCE: "Language as Imagery in Saint-John Perse," in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2, April, 1970, pp. 127-39.

In the following essay, Little discusses the function of language in Léger's poetry.

There are two obvious ways in which Perse reveals his attachment to language. The first shows in his technical mastery and his sensitivity to philology, the second in his extensive use of language itself as an image. Not only is language likened to things; things are also likened to language. The various manifestations of language become images in their own right, so creating the curious situation in which the tool becomes an integral part of the end product.

The process is essentially one of the materialisation of language by association with concrete phenomena and a consequent etherealisation of those phenomena through that association. A simple example will serve to make this clearer. Perse mentions in...