Quotes from Saint-John Perse

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.

It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

Hiver bouclé comme un bison, Hiver crispé comme la mousse de crin blanc, Hiver aux puits d'arsenic rouge, aux poches d'huile et de bitume, Hiver au goût de skunk et de carabe fumée de bois de hickory, Hiver aux prismes et aux critaux dans les carrefours de diamant noir, Hiver sans thyrses ni flambeaux, Hiver sans roses ni piscines, Hiver ! Hiver! tes pommes de cèdre de vieux fer! tes fruits de pierre! tes insectes de cuivre !

J'avais, j'avais ce goût de vivre chez les hommes, et voici que la terre exhale son âme d'étrangère...

Toda poesia é uma ontologia.

A world to be born under your footsteps. ?The poet is the one who breaks through our habits. ?The only menace is inertia.

The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.

Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet's hounds on the chase.