The French poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) succeeded, according to critic Roger Caillois, "in giving as a scene for his wholly spiritual chronicles a kind of supreme civilization, composed of the essence of those which history records and going beyond them in grandeur and majesty." In this bilingual edition of the Selected Poems, editor Mary Ann Caws has assembled extracts from all his major works--Anabasis, Praises, Exile, Rains, Snows, Winds, Seamarks, Chronique, Birds, and Song for an Equinox, in translations by T. S. Eliot, Louise Varse, Denis Devlin, Hugh Chisholm, Wallace Fowlie, Robert Fitzgerald, and Richard Howard

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, and Emerita and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She has translated and written on many surrealist writers including André Breton, René Char, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.