SOURCE: "Leopold Sédar Senghor's Poetry," in A Celebration of Black and African Writing, edited by Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 102-11.

In the following essay, Reed offers a positive assessment of Lettres d'Hivernage and suggests a literary context for Senghor's poetry.

Towards the end of a long essay which is still the best introduction to Senghor's poetry, Armand Guibert reflects that Senghor, who had recently become the President of his country, was perhaps already at the end of his career as a poet.

As this problem of the coexistence of political leader with poet has been posed it is worth noting that circumstances have already slowed down the career of the poetry which has been the subject of this essay. In the last five years, only five elegies have been added. Will the demands of public life in the end have the better...