(1) Henriette Levillian, “Le ritual poétique de Saint-John Perse”, Editions Gallimard 1977; “Like rhetoric, lyricism is a mortal evil for Being. The poesy and Manifesting arts destroy the death of mortality, but cannot cure her either. The poet will therefore have recourse, here again, to the tangible violence of recourse, here come, to the tangible violence of purifying breaths. when we sit, according to his own expression. poetry quenches thirst and fills the void created by the negativized efficiency of purifications. / On very frequent occasions, inside the work and the correspondence, the poet condemns lyricism. Each year, it designates the most immediate lyricism: the narcissistic lyricism of romantics. Let us not be surprised at such a caricatured reduction: the poet's allegory is so violent that it does not allow us to enter into subtleties and distinctions. / Romantic lyricism and sometimes associated with a flavor, sometimes perceived as a music. / (2) Passim: The taste is so 'delectable' that it leaves a suspicious aftertaste in the mouth. This is the case with 'this beautiful guttural phrase', uttered by a lama met in the Gobi desert who is ready to go home, friends, to mouth in the desert '. This is also the case with these 'cat of forgetfulness' of which Musset Purrati is either the merchant, as he is the author of the Malibran stanzas cited in the same strophe. They are as light as the waffle cones which enter into the fabrication of forgetfulness. Bland and often realized like the perishable butter cream that garnishes them. / The whole of the romantic lyricism is perceived like music, but music hails like the sound of the 'harpsichord', precious like the music of the boudoir'. It is the little music of the Verlainian interior twilights, the nostalgic timbre of Chopin's Nocturnes and Liszt's Years of Pilgrimage. Amidst the rhythmic gusts of the wind, the military rhythm of the rains and the great undulations of the swell, these 'songs' clash and irritate. But the immediate malaises given to Saint-John Perse by the blandness of forgetfulness and the harpsichord's feverishness is the symptom of a more internal evil: the disgust of purely sensitive feelings. It takes us back beyond a denunciation of the formal expression of lyricism, to the very birth of its inspiration. "
Marx Caesar Asimov 