Leger, Alexis “Saint-John Perse” By: Valérie Loichot Source: Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, Oxford University Press Leger, Alexis “Saint-John Perse” Sex: Male Born: Saint-Leger-les-Feuilles, Guadeloupe 31 May 1887 Died: Giens, France 20 September 1975 Activity/Profession: Poet (1887–1975), also known as Marie-René Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, poet and diplomat, was born on the islet of Saint-Leger-les-Feuilles in Guadeloupe on 31 May 1887 to Amédée Saint-Leger Leger, a solicitor, and Françoise-Renée Dormoy, an heiress to coffee and sugar plantations. Leger grew up in the city of Pointe-à-Pitre and on family plantations before moving to France in 1899 in the wake of the 1897 earthquake that precipitated the sugarcane-driven economic crisis. He never returned to Guadeloupe. At age 17, a few years after settling in the French city of Pau, he wrote his first collection of poems Images à Crusoé. In this collection, Leger reinvented the figure of Robinson Crusoe as stranded not on an island but in a desolate and gloomy French city. This early series of poems would later be incorporated into an expanded volume called Éloges (1911), published in the Nouvelle Revue Française and sponsored by the French writer André Gide. Although Leger’s legal name is used throughout this entry for the sake of consistency, he was known almost exclusively as Saint-John Perse in the artistic community. In Éloges, with its symbolist accents, Leger vividly and sensuously expressed the memories of a lost Guadeloupe peopled with the feminine universe of a mother and five sisters; of the central yet crumbling figure of a father-planter; of the complex universe of Carib, African, Asian, and mixed-race Creole servants; of palm trees and trade winds; of coffee and castor oil; of sun and sea. The quality of the poet’s apparently free verse was shaped by classical Greek and Latin metrics, but also inhabited by a Creole language manifested in the rhythm and prosody as well as in Creole words disguised as French. The poet’s representation of racial hierarchies and ethnic, class, and racial difference throughout these poems has at times been criticized as problematic. Like the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, Leger belonged to a class of white planters but grew up in close proximity, intimacy, and ambiguity with those beneath him in social standing. Like Faulkner, he gave a complex, if not tortured, account of postslavery plantation society. Despite the difficulties his writing raised, Caribbean writers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott considered him one of the