Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His great-grandfather, a solicitor, had settled in Guadeloupe in 1815. His grandfather and father were also solicitors; his father was also a member of the City Council. The Leger family owned two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the other of sugar (Bois-Debout).
In 1897, Hégésippe Légitimus, the first native Guadeloupan elected president of the Guadeloupe General Council, took office with a vindictive agenda towards colonists. The Leger family returned to metropolitan France in 1899 and settled in Pau. The young Alexis felt like an expatriate, and spent much of his time hiking, fencing, riding horses, and sailing in the Atlantic. He was awarded the baccalaureate with honors, and began studying law at the University of Bordeaux. When his father died in 1907, the resulting strain on his family's finances led Leger to temporarily interrupt his studies, but he eventually completed his degree in 1910.
In 1904 he met the poet Francis Jammes at Orthez, who became a dear friend. He frequented cultural clubs, and met Paul Claudel, Odilon Redon, Valery Larbaud, and André Gide. He wrote short poems inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe (Images à Crusoe) and undertook a translation of Pindar. He published his first book of poetry, Éloges, in 1911.
In 1914, he joined the French diplomatic service, and spent some of his first years in Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom. When World War I broke out, he was a press corps attaché for the government. From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French Embassy in Peking. In 1921 in Washington, while taking part in a world disarmament conference, he was noticed by Aristide Briand, the then-Prime Minister of France, who recruited him as his assistant. In Paris, he got to know the fellow intellectual poet Paul Valéry who used his influence to get the poem Anabase, written during Leger's stay in China, published. Leger was warm to classical music, and knew Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, and les Six.
While in China, Leger had written his first extended poem Anabase, publishing it in 1924 under the pseudonym "Saint-John Perse", one he employed for the rest of his life. He then published nothing for two decades, not even a re-edition of his debut book, because he believed it inappropriate for a diplomat to publish fiction. After Briand's death in 1932, Leger served as the General Secretary of the French Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay) until 1940. Within the Foreign Office he led the optimist faction that believed that Germany was unstable and that if Britain and France stood up to Hitler he would back down. He accompanied the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, where the cession of Czechoslovakia to Germany was agreed to. He was dismissed from his post right after the fall of France in May 1940, because he was a known anti-Nazi. In mid-July 1940, Leger began a long exile in Washington, D.C..
In 1940, the Vichy government dismissed him from the Légion d'honneur order and revoked his French citizenship (it was reinstated after the war). He was in some financial difficulty as an exile in Washington until Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Library of Congress and himself a poet, raised sufficient private donations to enable the Library to employ Perse until his official retirement from the French civil service in 1947. Perse declined a teaching position at Harvard University.
During his American exile, Perse wrote his long poems Exil, Vents, Pluies, Neiges, Amers, and Chroniques. He remained in the United States long after the end of the Second World War ended, traveling extensively, observing nature, and enjoying the friendship of, among others, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle and his spouse, author Katherine Garrison Chapin. Leger was on good terms with the UN Secretary General and author Dag Hammarskjöld. In 1957, American friends gave him a villa at Giens in Provence, and from that time on, he split his time between France and the United States. In 1958, he married the American Dorothy Milburn Russell.
In 1960, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he wrote the long poems Chronique, Oiseaux, Chant pour un équinoxe, and the shorter Nocturne and Sécheresse. In 1962, Georges Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create a series of etchings and aquatints titled L’Ordre des Oiseaux, which was published with the text of Perse's Oiseaux by Au Vent d'Arles'.
A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work (Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence) that remains active down to the present day. He died in his villa in Giens and is buried nearby.
Éloges (1911, transl. Eugène Jolas in 1928, Louise Varèse in 1944, Eleanor Clark and Roger Little in 1965, King Bosley in 1970)Anabase (1924, transl. T.S. Eliot in 1930, Roger Little in 1970)Exil (1942, transl. Denis Devlin, 1949)Pluies (1943, transl. Denis Devlin in 1944)Poème à l'étrangère (1943, transl. Denis Devlin in 1946)Neiges (1944, transl. Denis Devlin in 1945, Walter J. Strachan in 1947)Vents (1946, transl. Hugh Chisholm in 1953)Amers (1957, transl. Wallace Fowlie in 1958, extracts by George Huppert in 1956, Samuel E. Morison in 1964)Chronique (1960, transl. Robert Fitzgerald in 1961)Poésie (1961, transl. W. H. Auden in 1961)Oiseaux (1963, transl. Wallace Fowlie in 1963, Robert Fitzgerald in 1966, Roger Little in 1967, Derek Mahon in 2002)Pour Dante (1965, transl. Robert Fitzgerald in 1966)Chanté par celle qui fut là (1969, transl. Richard Howard in 1970)Chant pour un équinoxe (1971)Nocturne (1973)Sécheresse (1974)Collected Poems (1971) Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.Œuvres complètes (1972), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard. The definitive edition of his work. Leger designed and edited this volume, which includes a detailed chronology of his life, speeches, tributes, hundreds of letters, notes, a bibliography of the secondary literature, and extensive extracts from those parts of that literature the author liked. Enlarged edition, 1982.1936
S. A. Rhodes, "Poetry of Saint-John Perse", The Sewanee Review, vol. XLIV, no. 1, Jan.-March 19361944
Paul Rosenfeld, "The Poet Perse", The Nation, New York, vol. CLVIII, no. 20, 15 May 1944John Gould Fletcher, "On the Poetry of Alexis Saint-Leger Leger", Quarterly Review of Literature, vol. II, Autumn 1944Edouard Roditi, "Éloges and other poems, Saint-John Perse", Contemporary Poetry, Baltimore, vol. IV, no. 3, Autumn 19441945
Conrad Aiken, "Rains, by Saint-John Perse. Whole Meaning or Doodles", New Republic, Washington, no. CXII, 16 April 1945.1948
David Gascoigne, "Vents by Saint-John Perse", Poetry, London, June–July 1948,1949
Valéry Larbaud, préface à Anabasis, translated by Jacques Le Clerq, in Anabasis, New York, Harcourt, Brace and C°, 1949.Hugo von Hofmannsthal, préface à Anabasis, translated by James Stern, ibid.Giuseppe Ungaretti, préface à Anabasis, translated by Adrienne Foulke, ibid.Archibald MacLeish, "The Living Spring", Saturday Review, vol. XXXII, no. 24, 16 July 1949Hubert Creekmore, "An Epic Poem of the Primitive Man", New York Times Book Review, 25 December 19491950
Allen Tate, "Hommage to Saint-John Perse", Poetry, Chicago, LXXV, January 1950Harold W. Watts, "Anabase: The Endless Film", University of Toronto Quarterly, vol XIX, no. 3, April 1950Stephen Spender, "Tribute to Saint-John Perse", Cahiers de la Pléiade, Paris, Summer-Autumn 19501952
Amos Wilder, "Nature and the immaculate world in Saint-John Perse", in Modern Poetry and the Christian tradition, New York, 1952Katherine Garrison Chapin, "Saint-John Perse. Notes on Some Poetic Contrasts", The Sewanee Review1953
Paul Claudel, "A Poem by St.-John Perse", translation by Hugh Chisholm, in Winds, New York, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, no. 34, 1953.Gaëtan Picon, "The Most proudly free", translation by Willard R. Trask, ibid, 1st edition in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été-automne 1950.Albert Béguin, "A Poetry marked by scansion", translation by Willard R. Trask, ibid, 1st edition in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été-automne 1950.Gabriel Bounoure, "St.-John Perse and poetic ambiguity", translation by Willard R. Trask, ibid, 1st edition in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été-automne 1950.Wallace Fowlie, "The Poetics of Saint-John Perse", Poetry,, Chicago, vol. LXXXII, no. 6, September 1953Hayden Carruth, "Winds by Saint-John Perse... Parnassus stormed", The Partisan Review, vol. XX, no. 5, September–October 1953Henri Peyre, "Exile by Saint-John Perse", Shenandoah, Lexington, vol. V, Winter 19531956
"Tribute to Saint-John Perse", The Berkeley Review (Arthur J. Knodel, René Girard, Georges Huppert), vol. I, no. 1, Berkeley, 19561957
Archibald MacLeish, "Saint-John Perse. The Living Spring", in A continuing journey. Essays and Addresses, Boston, 1957Wallace Fowlie, "Saint-John Perse", in A Guide to Contemporary french Literature, from Valéry to Sartre, New York, 1957Anonymous, "Saint-John Perse, poet of the Fare Shore", Times Literary Supplement, London, 2 March 1957Paul West, "The Revival of Epic", The Twentieth Century, London, July 19571958
Conrad Aiken, A Reviewer's A.B.C., Collected criticism from 1916, New York, 1958Jacques Guicharnaud, "Vowels of the Sea: Amers", Yale French Studies, no. 21, Spring-Summer 1958Martin Turnell, "The Epic of Saint-John Perse", The Commonweal, LXX, 17 July 1958W. H. Auden, "A song of life's power to renew", New York Times Book Review, vol. LXIII, no. 30, 27 July 1958Melvin Maddocks, "Perse as Cosmologist", Christian Science Monitor, 4 September 1958John Marshall, "The greatest Living French Poet", The Yale Review, XLVIII, September 1958Katherine Garrison Chapin, "Perse on the sea with Us: Amers", The New Republic, Washington, CXXXIX, 27 October 19581959
H.-J. Kaplan,"Saint-John Perse: The Recreation of the World", The Reporter, XV, 22 January 1959Raymond Mortimer, "Mr Eliot and Mr Perse: Two fine Poets in tandem", Sunday Times, London, May 1959Philip Toynbee, "A great modern Poet", The Observer, London, 31 May 1959Charles Guenther, "Prince among the Prophets", Poetry, Chicago, vol. XCIII, no. 5, 19591976
Joseph Henry McMahon, A Bibliography of works by and about Saint-John Perse, Stanford University, 19591960
Stanley Burnshaw, "Saint-John Perse", in The Poem Itself, New York, 1960Joseph MacMahon, "A question of Man", Commonweal, LXXIII, 13 January 1960Byron Colt, "Saint-John Perse", Accent, New York, XX,3, Summer 1960Joseph Barry, "Science and poetry merge in the crucial stage of creation", New York Post, 12 December 19601961
Bernard Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism. Studies of Five modern French Poets. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Manchester, 1961Anthony Hartley, "Saint-John Perse", Encounter, London, no. 2, Feb. 1961Octavio Paz, "Saint-John Perse as Historian", The Nation, New York, 17 June 1961Donald Davis, "Chronique by Saint-John Perse", New Statesman, London, LXII, 26 July 1961John Montague, "The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", Irish Times, Dublin, 25 August 1961Léon-S. Roudiez, "The Epochal Poetry of Saint-John Perse", Columbia University Forum, New York, vol. IV, 19611962
Anthony Curtis, "Back to the Elements", The Sunday Telegraph, London, 7 January 1962Amos Wilder, "St-John Perse and the future of Man", Christianity and Crisis, New York, vol. XXI, no. 24, 22 January 1962Ronald Gaskell, "The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", The London Magazine, vol. I, no. 12, March 1962Peter Russel, "Saint-John Perse's Poetical works", Agenda, London, May–June 1962Cecil Hemley, "Onward and Upward", Hudson Review, XV, Summer 19621963
Eugenia Maria Arsenault, Color imagery in the Vents of Saint-John Perse, Catholic University of America, Washington, 19631964
Arthur J. Knodel, "Towards an Understanding of Anabase", PMLA, June 1964Eugenia Vassylkivsky, The Main Themes of Saint-John Perse, Columbia University, 19641966
Arthur J. Knodel, Saint-John Perse. A Study of his Poetry, Edimburg, 1966R. W. Baldner, "Saint-John Perse as Poet Prophet" in Proceedings of the Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, vol. XVII, no. 22, 19661967
Roger Little, Word Index of the Complete Poetry and Prose of Saint-John Perse, Durham, 1966 and 1967M. Owen de Jaham, An Introduction to Saint-John Perse, University of South Western Louisiana, 19671968
Kathleen Raine, "Saint-John Perse, Poet of the Marvellous", Encounter, vol. IV, no. 29, October 1967; idem in Defending Ancient Springs, Oxford, 19681969
Roger Little, "T. S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse", The Arlington Quarterly Review, University of Texas, vol. II, no. 2, Autumn 19691970
Charles Delamori, "The Love and aggression of Saint-John Perse's Pluies", Yale French Studies, 1970Richar O. Abel, The Relationship between the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse, University of Southern California, 19701971
Roger Little, Saint-John Perse. A Bibliography for Students of His Poetry, London, 1971Ruth N. Horry, Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse. Parallels and Contrasts, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1971Pierre Emmanuel, Praise and Presence, with a Bibliography, Washington, 1971Candace Uter De Russy, Saint-John Perse's Chronique: a study of Kronos and other themes through imagery, Tulane University, 1971Marc Goodhart, Poet and Poem in Exile, University of Colorado, 19711972
René Galand, Saint-John Perse, New York, 1972Richard Ruland, America as metaphor in modern French Letters. Celine, Julien Green and Saint-John Perse, New York, 19721973
Roger Little, Saint-John Perse, University of London, 1973Carol Nolan Rigolot, The Dialectics of Poetry: Saint-John Perse, University of Michigan, 19731974
Richard-Allen Laden, Saint-John Perse's Vents: From Theme to Poetry, Yale University, 19741976
Elizabeth Jackson, Worlds Apart Structural Parallels in the Poetry of Paul Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Benjamin Perret and René Char, The Hague, 1976Arthur J. Knodel, Saint-John Perse: Lettres, Princeton, 1979Edith Jonssen-Devillers, Cosmos and the Sacred in the poetics of Octavio Paz and Saint-John Perse, San Diego, University of California, 1976John M. Cocking, "The Migrant Muse: Saint-John Perse", Encounter, London, XLVI, March 1976Elizabeth Jennings, "Saint-John Perse: the worldly seer", in Seven Men of Vision: an appreciation, London, 1976Roger Little, "A letter about Conrad by Saint-John Perse", Conradiana, Lubbock, Texas, VIII, no. 3, Autumn 1976Anonymous, "An Exile for Posterity", The Times Literary Supplement, London, no. 3860, 5 March 19761977
Roger Little, "The Eye at the Center of Things", Times Literary Supplement, London, no. 3941, 7 October 1977Roger Little, "Saint-John Perse and Joseph Conrad: some notes and an uncollected Letter", Modern language Review, Cambridge, LXII, no. 4, October 1977Roger Little, "The World and the Word in Saint-John Perse", in Sensibility and Creation: Essays in XXth Century French Poetry, London and New York, 1977John D. Price, "Man, Women and the Problem of Suffering in Saint-John Perse", Modern language Review, Cambridge, LXII, no. 3, July 19771978
Reino Virtanen, "Between Saint-John and Persius: Saint-John Perse and Paul Valéry", Symposium, Summer 1978Roger Little, "Saint-John Perse and Denis Devlin: a compagnonage", Irish University Review, Dublin, VIII, Autumn 19781979
Roger Little, "Claudel and Saint-John Perse. The Convert and the Unconvertible", Claudel Studies, VI, 19791982
Steven Winspur, "Saint-John Perse's Oiseaux: the Poem, the Painting and beyond", L'Esprit Créateur, Columbia University, XXII, no. 4, Winter 19821983
William Calin, "Saint-John Perse", in A Muse for heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France, University of Toronto Press, 1983Steven Winspur, "The Poetic Signifiance of the Thing-in-itself", Sub-stance, no. 41, 1983Joseph T. Krause, "The Visual Form of Saint-John Perse's Imagery", Aix-en-Provence, 1983Peter Fell, "A Critical Study of Saint-John Perse's Chronique" . MA dissertation, University of Manchester, 19831984
Saint-John Perse: Documentary Exhibition and Works on the Poem Amers, Washington, 1984–19851985
Erika Ostrovsky, Under the Sign of Ambiguity: Saint-John Perse/Alexis Leger, New York, 19851988
Steven Winspur, Saint-John Perse and the Imaginary Reader, Geneva, 1988Peter Baker, "Perse on Poetry", The Connecticut Review, Willimantic, XI, no. 1, 1988Peter Baker, "Saint-John Perse, Alexis Leger, 1960", The Nobel Prize Winners: Literature, April 19881990
Peter Baker, "Exile in Language", Studies in 20th century Literature, Manhattan (Kansas) and Lincoln (Nebraska), XIV, no. 2, Summer 1990Judith Kopenhagen-Urian, "The voyage chronotop and other dynamic topoi in Saint-John Perse's Work", American Comparative Literature Association, Pennsylvania State University, annual meeting Marc 29-31 1990 (unpublished)Erika Ostrovsky, "Saint-John Perse", The Twentieth Century, New York, 19901991
Luigi Fiorenzato, Anabasis/Anabase: T. S. Eliot translates Saint-John Perse, Padova, 1991–1992Peter Baker, "Metric, Naming and Exile: Perse, Pound, Genet", in The Scope of Words in Honor to Albert S. Cook, New York, 1991Peter Baker, Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem, University of Florida Press, 19911992
Josef Krause, "The Two Axes of Saint-John Perse's Imagery", Studi Francesi, Torino, XXXVI, no. 106, 1992Carol Rigolot, "Ancestors, Mentors and 'Grands Aînés': Saint-John Perse's Chronique", Literary Generations, Lexington, 19921994
Richard L. Sterling, The Prose Works of Saint-John Perse. Towards an Understanding of His Poetry, New York, 19941996
Richard A. York, "Saint-John Perse, the diplomat", Claudel Studies, XXIII, 1-2, 19961997
Judith Urian, The Biblical context in Saint-John Perse's work, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 19971999
Mary Gallagher, "Seminal Praise: The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", in An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone writing, Oxford, 1999Carol Rigolot, "Saint-John Perse's Oiseaux: from Audubon to Braque and beyond", in Resonant Themes: literature, history and the arts in XIXth - and XXth - century Europe, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1999Judith Urian, "Delicious abyss: the biblical darkness in the poetry of Saint-John Perse", Comparative literature studies, XXXVI, no. 3, 19992000
Jeffrey Mehlman, Émigré New York. French Intellectuals in Wartime, Manhattan, 1940–1944, Baltimore and London, 2000Zeyma Kamalick, In Defense of Poetry: T. S. Eliot's translation ofAnabase by Saint-John Perse, Princeton, 20002001
Emmanuelle Hériard Dubreuil, Une certaine idée de la France: Alexis Leger's views during the occupation of France June 1940-August 1944, London School of Economics, 2001Pierre Lastenet, Saint-John Perse and the Sacred, University of London, 2001Marie-Noëlle Little, The Poet and the Diplomat [Correspondence Saint-John Perse/Dag Hammarskjöld], Syracuse University Press, 2001Marie-Noëlle Little, "It is the same land: Poetry and Diplomacy for Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger", Uppsala, 7 September 2001, in Dag Hammarskjöld and the XXIst Century (Unpublished work)Marie-Noëlle Little, "Letters written, read and translated: The Correspondence of Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger", Uppsala, 8 September 2001, in Dag Hammarskjöld and the XXIst Century (Unpublished work)Marie-Noëlle Little, "Travellers in two Worlds: Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger", in Development Dialogue, Uppsala, 20012002
Carol Rigolot, Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse's Conversations with Culture, The University of North Carolina Press, 20022003
Mary Gallagher, "Re-membering Caribbean childhoods, Saint-John Perse's Éloges and Patrick Chamoiseau's Antan d'enfance", in The Francophone Caribbean today-literature, language, culture, The University of West Indies Press, 20032004
Colette Camelin, "Hermes and Aphrodite in Saint-John Perse's Winds and Seemarks", in Hermes and Aphrodite Encounters, Birmingham, 2004Patrick Chamoiseau, "Excerpts freely adapted from Meditations for Saint-John Perse", Literature and Arts of the Americas, XXXVII, no. 12005
Henriette Levillain, Saint-John Perse, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris, 2005Joseph Acquisto, "The Lyric of Narrative: Exile, Poetry and Story in Saint-John Perse and Elisabeth Bishop", Orbis Litterarum, no. 5, 2005Xue Die, "Saint-John Perse's Palm Trees", American Letters and Commentary, no. 17, 2005Valérie Loichot, "Saint-John Perse's Imagined Shelter: J'habiterai mon nom, in Discursive Geographies, Writing Space and Place in French, Amsterdam, 2005Carol Rigolot, "Blood Brothers: Archibald MacLeish and Saint-John Perse", Archibald MacLeish Journal, Summer 2005Carol Rigolot, "Saint-John Perse", in Transtlantic relations, France and the Americas, Culture, Politics, History, Oxford and Santa Barbara, 20052007
Valérie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison and Saint-John Perse, University of Virginia Press, 2007Harris Feinsod, "Reconsidering the 'Spiritual Economy': Saint-John Perse, his translators and the limits of internationalism", "Benjamin, Poetry and Criticism", Telos, New York, no. 38, 2007Peter Poiana, "The order of Nemesis in Saint-John Perse's Vents", Neophilologus, vol. 91, no. 1, 2007Jeffrey Meyers, "The Literary Politics of the Nobel Prize", Antioch Review, vol. 65, no. 2, 2007