Forged Genealogies

According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize–winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where interlocutors are almost always reduced to anonymity. In this book, Rigolot analyzes the poet’s multiple strategies of dialogue, capturing his conversations with a surprising range of people — from biblical figures and ancient Greek and Roman authors to artists as diverse as Dante and Shakespeare, Chateaubriand and Hugo, Audubon, Whitman, Poe, Baudelaire, Verne, Mallarme, Gaughin, Rimbaud, Loti, Claudel, Valery, Segalen, and Braque.