SOURCE: "The Poetics of St.-John Perse," in Poetry, Vol. 82, No. 6, September, 1953, pp. 345-50.

In the following favorable review of Vents, Fowlie places Léger within the context of modern French poets as well as the tradition of Symbolism and Surrealism.

St.-John Perse revindicates, reactivates the ancient belief that each event in the history of man signifies something else. In this sense, the work of the poet is comparable to the work of the psychoanalyst who explores the meanings of things and at the end of the search illuminates them. Poetry is a combination of two languages: one, the words defined in dictionaries and used by the contemporaries of the poet, the vocabularies of the uneducated and the educated; and the other, the rhythm of language, the spell created by combinations of words. This second language is in reality the poet's effort to move beyond langauge, to...