SOURCE: "Voice and Vision, Cry and Gesture: The Birds of Saint-John Perse," in Symposium, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 103-13.

In the following essay, Cranston asserts that birds are "the overarching theme of Léger's œuvre."

The Saint-John Foundation, organized in 1976, placed its inaugural exhibit in Aix-en-Provence under the heading, "Les Oiseaux et l'Œuvre de Saint-John Perse," a title at once appropriate and surprising. While Perse's "cult of movement" has received much scholarly attention, this theme has generally been linked not to the flight of birds, but to the interplay of cosmic phenomena as seen in Pluies (1943), Neiges (1944), and Vents (1944), or to the long marches across land and sea sung from Anabase (1924) to Amers (1957). These are, by common consensus, the milestones on Perse's way.

The 1962 "méditation poétique" that came to be known as Oiseaux (1963), on the other hand, met with reservations in accounts such as...