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Concept
Saint-John Perse
Summary
Alexis Leger (ləʒe; 31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975), better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse (sɛ̃ d͜ʒɔn pɛʁs; also Saint-Leger Leger), was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His great-grandfather, Prosper Louis Léger a solicitor, had settled in Guadeloupe in 1815. His grandfather and father were also solicitors; his father was also a member of the city council. The Leger family owned two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the other of sugar (Bois-Debout). St. Léger described his childhood on Guadeloupe as "the son of a family French as only the colonials are French". Later on, Léger greatly embellished his family origins by changing his surname to the more aristocratic sounding St Léger-Léger and by claiming that his ancestors were an ancienne noblesse family who had settled in Guadeloupe in the 17th century. The Léger family were well off and Léger had a happy boyhood. Léger was closer to his warm and loving mother than his cold and distant father. The French scholar Marie-Noëlle Little wrote that: "Growing up surrounded by the luxurious fauna and flora of the West Indies, Alexis perhaps could not but develop an interest in nature...".
After the Spanish-American War that saw the United States annex Puerto Rico and occupy Cuba, rumors were rampant in the French West Indies that the United States would seize the French colonies in the Caribbean. In 1899, known as the "year of all dangers", was a period of racial tension on Guadeloupe with both blacks and whites committing arson out of the belief that French rule would soon be ending. The Leger family returned to metropolitan France in 1899 and settled in Pau. The young Alexis felt like an expatriate and spent much of his time hiking, fencing, riding horses and sailing in the Atlantic.
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