SOURCE: "The Sexuation of Poetic Language in Saint-John Perse's Anabase," in Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem, University of Florida Press, 1991, pp. 30-40.

In the following essay, Baker examines Anabase from a feminine perspective.

A serious meditation on sexual difference serves to motivate the disposition of the text of Anabase, both in its specific language and its overall strategies of representation. Beginning with specific uses of language means reexamining the often-remarked strangeness of the language Perse employs to describe objects in the natural world. Analysis of this "semiotics of the natural world" in Anabase shows that the descriptive register of objects in nature and gender-marked human traits intermingle in figurai strategies that defy traditional tenor/vehicle distinctions. The traditional inner/outer distinction drawn between "man" and nature is refigured in the register of sexual differences. Like the human/natural difference, sexual difference is both nonassimilable and...