Word: leger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also serves to remind Americans that the poet with one of the most notable double lives since Christopher Marlowe is now consultant for French poetry at the Library of Congress. For St. John Perse is the pseudonym of Marie Rene Auguste Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, for years France's celebrated diplomat and wily Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs...
...years (1924-40) Léger presided behind the scenes of France's Foreign Office. He was known as "the Vansittart of the Quai d'Orsay," "Europe's greatest living diplomat." Said one awed foreign observer: "Präsidenten gehen, Aussenminister gehen, aber Alexis Leger bleibt immer da" ("Presidents go, foreign ministers go, but Alexis Leger always remains...
When he became Secretary, Leger had written two thin books of verse, Eloges (1910) and Anabase (his most talked-about poem, 1924). Most Frenchmen never heard of these symbolistic efforts and most of those who did thought them as tortuous and intangible as Leger's diplomacy. But they were well read (says Hemispheres Editor Goll) at the superrealistic Wilhelmstrasse...
Father of an Echo. Poet T. S. Eliot read them too. He translated Anabase, rated the poem with the best of James Joyce. Others have called Poet Perse-Leger the father of modern poetry. "Perse," said Eda Lou Walton, "caught the modern nostalgia for new fields of exploration, the sense of decay in the old, the use of a mythical pageantry to suggest world movements and retardations. He wrote the 'Anabasis' and modern poem after modern poem has echoed his theme...
Orpheus, with eye-filling Jones settings, gave a comparative youngster, yellow-haired Contralto Anna Kaskas, a chance to let loose as the hero. Lofty and noble was Orpheus, but not too much so. Said Music Director Frank St. Leger of the English translation: "We got the Goddamned twaddle...