WHEN he was translating St-John Perse’s poem Anabase, T. S. Eliot wrote to the French poet to say that he considered the poem “one of the greatest and most singular of modern times”. It was rare for Eliot to express such praise for a contemporary poet; more often, when commenting on the work of his contemporaries, he phrased his estimation with diplomatic care. Clearly, he meant his remark to St-John Perse (1887-1975) to be a true expression of a sincerely formed conviction, but I was a little overawed by the public revelation of such an unequivocal privately expressed declaration of admiration when reading his letters (The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3, p.373, Yale University Press, 2012). I had read Eliot’s translation, Anabasis, some 30 years ago, had a vague memory of liking it, but retained no image or detail from it, and made curious by Eliot’s high praise, felt compelled to re-read his translation in St-John Perse’s Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1971).

The volume opens with an essay titled, ‘On Poetry’, a translation by W. H. Auden of the speech St-John Perse delivered when accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. In it, Perse proclaims the core beliefs held by other poets but rarely presented in so elegant a prose composed as an assemblage of sharply logical ideas, a form of persuasive rhetoric at which French intellectuals excel. Perse begins by declaring, “Poetry rarely receives public homage.” Society is “subjected to material bondage”: in its obsessive acquisitiveness, human vanity places more value on expensive-looking objects than on the abstract pleasure to be derived from the highest expression of art or scientific discovery. Referring to Einstein and Heisenberg, Perse remarks that the scientist, too, is engaged in a ‘poetic’ creative act, for in the very grip of making his momentous discovery, the scientist is obliged to invoke “intuition to come to the rescue of reason”. The universe is a “primal abyss” in which the scientist and the poet are “two blind figures, blind from birth,” attempting to configure the chaos of sensual data into a sharply defined and stable image of reality. But it is the poet alone who discovers the “language through which is transmitted the supreme rhythm of Being” and projects the image of “a transcendental reality”. Perse then declares: “Out of the poetic need, which is one of the spirit, all the religions have been born, and by the poetic grace the divine spark is kept eternally alight within the human flint.” What poetry explores is “the dark of the soul” and “the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence.” The highest form of poetry is a spiritual exploration, a pilgrimage of the inner self to which Eliot, too, was drawn.

In the final section of his Four Quartets, completed 13 years after he translated Anabase, Eliot concludes his meditation on the self’s spiritual relationship with time and space with the declaration, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time”, which echoes the general drift of Perse’s poem. Perse had taken his theme from the historical Anabasis composed by the Greek philosopher and soldier Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates, who tells the story of how he led ten thousand Greek mercenaries across desolate Mesopotamia after losing a decisive battle against Persian forces at Babylon in 401 BC. A metaphor for the human struggle in a pitiless universe may be derived from Xenophon’s Anabasis: there is the long journey across a desert and then snowy mountains, with hunger and thirst to endure, until the final release of arriving home on the shore of the Black Sea, as if the soul were at last freed from the body’s pain. It has been a circular journey of despair and hope, defeat and victory. Eliot echoes that theme in the line, “In my beginning is my end”, in the second of his Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’. The exile comes home at last, the suffering body has survived, the cacophony of its physical struggle has finally been snuffed and faintly there begins to be heard the celestial ode to joy, and in that climactic moment of apprehending the artist-poet’s vision, the soul receives its ultimate release and like a brilliant white dove unhesitatingly takes off on its ecstatic flight into the infinite blue.

In his Anabase, Perse extracts an abstract idea of that symbolic progress and attempts to create a timeless poem, with only his title to suggest that Xenophon has been his inspiration. It is an elusive poem, in that, when reading it, one hears the tone of a pure poetry and obtains the sense of some urgent action, as of hazy figures barely discerned through the smoke and dust in a scene of battle, the thick air filled with voices expressive of the agitated commotion of an unseen humanity, but even as that impression registers on one’s mind it is immediately succeeded by blankness and silence, and yet the memory continues that what one has just experienced has been poetry. One cannot say that the poem is obscure but if asked to state what one has understood the only answer is that it is a poem to be experienced, not to be paraphrased, an answer that unfortunately sounds like a mystic’s claiming to see an extraordinary vision that eludes the rest of us. Perhaps it was a similar snobbish affectation that led Eliot to begin the preface to his translation by declaring that he did not think “that a poem like Anabase requires a preface at all”, and to suggest that the reader would gain more from just reading the poem six times. He does, rather grudgingly, attempt an elucidatory remark: “The poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilisations of any races and epochs of the ancient East.” (That ‘any’ could be a misprint for ‘many’.)

Indeed, that much of a loose narrative does register on the brain of an attentive reader, but re-reading the translation three times and doing a close comparison with the original French, which should have confirmed the earlier impression of experiencing a pure poetry, drew my attention instead to details revelatory of a conventional, mediocre work, which made me question what could have been in Eliot’s mind when he called this one of the greatest poems of modern times. That it certainly is not. That last short sentence with its five simple words was preceded by a very long pause, so shocked I was to be disagreeing with Eliot (who to most of us, as Pound was to him, is Il miglior fabbro), and wondered if I’d misread the poem. I discussed the subject with the British poet Christopher Middleton who, besides being the best living English poet, has a deep knowledge of European literature and has translated significant works from French and German; he said that some 60 years ago he, too, had thought highly of Perse’s poems but that his admiration had diminished considerably: he found him portentous.

That’s the word I’d been resisting. But hearing it expressed in a somewhat dismissive tone by a poet of Middleton’s eminence showed me what was wrong with so much in Perse, and I read Eliot’s translation again as well as some of the original French. Right there, on the very first page are examples of portentous writing that to a casual reader might look like serious poetry — e.g., “So I haunted the City of your dreams, and I established in the desolate markets the pure commerce of my soul”.

One characteristic common to poets eager to appear in bardic robes before genuflecting readers is to place words like dream and soul in some abstract context that sounds grand and is assumed by the reader to be full of profound meaning but when examined closely is seen to be meaningless or plain nonsense. O reader haunting the city — sorry, City — of your dreams, let me know the next time your soul decides to do some commerce in the market, I’ll come with my basket full of dreams and we’ll do some pure trading! How could I have not noticed such obvious shallow pomposity? As readers, we are easily coerced into admiring writers whose reputation parades in front of our eyes before our eyes can look at their work. It’s the old story of the emperor’s new clothes.

The second page of Perse’s Anabasis has a passage that ends with the line, “Eternity yawning on the sands.” I pause there and stare in disbelief. Eternity yawning on the sands? Can a serious poet, and not an ignorant juvenile, have considered this banal cliché a moment of high poetry? And what’s more, been translated by an admiring T. S. Eliot who surely should have observed the cloth in his hands was not a new silken robe but a shabby worn-out old garment? A few pages later, there is, “And my soul, my soul keeps loud vigil at the portals of death”, followed by many more instances of similarly empty but deep-sounding puerile ‘poetic’ phrasing to the end, giving the reader not so much the experience of having completed a spiritual exploration as having survived a corporal flagellation.

Needless to say, I exaggerate, and speak in anger, to console myself that an idol once held dear has fallen from my hands and the broken fragments reveal nothing but ordinary clay that had formed a body which I now perceive had been empty inside. It’s a muddy world. Perhaps portentousness that jars upon an English ear has a natural beatific resonance for the French. To test this notion, I open a volume by another distinguished contemporary, Yves Bonnefoy. Within a few pages, there is “Nous étions l’illusion qu’on nomme souvenir” (“We were the illusion called memory”), and “Quand le temps cesse” (“When time stops”) on the next page. I begin to hear a faintly irritating hum in my ear. Not too many pages later, there is “Les ombres soient leur pain et le vent leur eau” (“Shadows are their bread and the wind their water”), and the hum has turned to tinnitus. There are so many ‘shadows’ in Bonnefoy’s poems, they seem a convenient readymade effect with which to appear ‘poetic’ — e.g., “Vois, tu as sur le sable assez de lumière / Pour jouer avec l’ombre de ton corps” (“See, you have enough light on the sand / To play with the shadow of your body”). And too often there is an expression of a thought that might sound profound to a naïve reader but is plain nonsense — e.g., “Ils avançaient, avec la majesté des choses simples” (“They advanced with the majesty of simple things”).

Hold on now! I am surrounded by many simple things — pencils, paper, lamps, bananas. I never see them advancing or retreating, let alone in a manner that shows them to possess majesty. And if, as the line emphatically implies, majesty belongs exclusively to simple things, then it must follow that complex things are without majesty. Well, go and place a banana next to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner and see which one advances with majesty. Of course, I cannot deny that as a foreigner I might well be deaf and blind to certain cultural nuances that for the native French reader would instinctively create a contextual depth of understanding that an outsider could never be able to fathom. But majesty is majesty in any language and simple things are simple things in any society, and I do not see how a French person cannot believe that “la majesté des choses simples” is plain nonsense.

It is a hangover of old-fashioned Parnassian poetry to be relying on large abstractions about shadows, illusion, eternity and majesty to suggest one’s poem contains deep thought or bears the guaranteed stamp of what is commonly believed to be ‘poetry’. To be sure, there are shadows, illusion and eternity in some of my own poems, though I trust I’m not being delusional in thinking they were chosen with logical precision. There are shadows and darkness of soul in a great deal of poetry —Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a prime example. And the image of a shadow creeping up on a clock occurs to many a young poet as an original dramatically charged symbolic representation of time about to be devoured by darkness.

However, with serious poets who ought to know their literature, one would think that after Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud the purveyors of shadowy majesty would be shredded into extinction; but each generation is obliged to go through its own recycling of mediocrity until a new poet emerges who purifies the language of the tribe. In mid-20th-century France, that poet was Francis Ponge (1899-1988). Ponge’s poems are so deeply rooted in the etymological and lexicographical history of the French language that they are nearly impossible to appreciate in another language; indeed, even the ordinary native reader would be hard pressed to appreciate any ‘poetry’ in them or even to grasp their meaning. For an English reader, the best initiation to Ponge’s work would be to read Serge Gavronsky’s introductory essays to The Sun Placed in the Abyss (New York, Sun, 1977) and The Power of Language (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979), both important books of Ponge’s work in translation, the former also including Gavronsky’s informative interview with Ponge.

The two famous injunctions by English-language poets — Pound’s “Go in fear of abstraction” and William Carlos Williams’s “No ideas but in things” — were echoed by Ponge, who declared: “The poet must never put forward a thought but an object,” and added, “even upon thought itself, he must impose the stance of an object”, which echoes Eliot’s “objective correlative”. Ponge, however, takes objectivity a stage further by making the object itself, and not what it might metaphorically or symbolically signify, the poem. A walnut is a walnut, we know nothing of what’s inside it until we crack it open, but then what we know is the crack we make and not what might be called its ‘walnutness’. There’s more to Ponge’s objects than in the simplistic example of the walnut I’ve just invented, but you get the idea. There are many dimensions to an object: just to look at a thing involves us in complex strategies — holding it up against the light, seeing it submerged in water, examining it in a microscope, etc., and then the word itself which in our language is our name for the object has a history of usage that has undergone subtle changes over the centuries; all of that, as well as the current dictionary meaning with its etymological information, is expressed in even the most casual use of that one word. Ponge’s genius is that he can take these words — Soap, Bread, Rain, Snails, Manure, The Oyster, The Prairie, etc. — and make memorable poetry out of them.

He’s aware, of course, of the metaphorical relationship of objects to the human conception of reality: as he himself says about his remarkable poem, ‘Soap’, “There is also an evident relationship to the idea of purification, and the idea that one does not arrive at purity, at the ideal of purity, if one doesn’t hold in one’s hand this little object”. It is not an easy poetry to enjoy, if one’s idea of poetry has not advanced beyond Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, but its intellectual vigour communicates an unprecedented aesthetic pleasure. Reconsidering my criticism of Perse and Bonnefoy, a pang of regret sends me back to their books to see if rereading an old favourite might not restore my old enthusiasm for their work. Bonnefoy’s ‘The Curved Planks’ ends with “… the limitless space of clashing currents, of shining abysses, of stars.” And his ‘Driving Faster’ ends with, “… the great night loomed ahead, empty of stars.” And there again you have examples of the poet not creating but reaching out for a rubber stamp. When in doubt, go for the stars.

As for Perse, I went back to his ‘Birds’ the very memory of which, with its exquisite references to the painted birds of Georges Braque, has enchanted me for decades, but while some of the thought in it is still compelling, the poem’s final paragraphs only provide more examples of portentousness — “to that immensity of living and creating that stirred the deepest night”, “Ignorant of their shadow, knowing of death only that immortal part which is consumed in the distant clamour of great waters”, “… they have preserved for us something of the dream of creation.” Again, when in doubt, go for shadows and dreams, and don’t forget death and immortality, they all make the right noise that some people hear as Poetry.