SOURCE: "Leopold Sédar Senghor's Poetry," in A Celebration of Black and African Writing, edited by Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 102-11.

Towards the end of a long essay which is still the best introduction to Senghor's poetry, Armand Guibert reflects that Senghor, who had recently become the President of his country, was perhaps already at the end of his career as a poet.

As this problem of the coexistence of political leader with poet has been posed it is worth noting that circumstances have already slowed down the career of the poetry which has been the subject of this essay. In the last five years, only five elegies have been added. Will the demands of public life in the end have the better of the inward man? Strictly every poet carries the rank of prince, whether he is a cut-purse like Villon or a ploughman like Burns. But if the Prince also holds real temporal power, he will envy cut-purse and ploughman the obscurity that guarantees their freedom.¹

Guibert was writing in 1961. Senghor's last new volume of poetry was Ethiopiques, published in 1956. The recent Nocturnes (1961) was really a revised version of Chants pour Naëtt (1949) with the addition of the five elegies. In the years that followed, the slowing down became very nearly a standstill. There was one more elegy published in Présence Africaine. Then nothing. The Editions du Seuil hard-back collected Poèms of 1961 included a small additional section, Poèmes Divers, but these are evidently juvenalia or at least poems earlier than Chants d'Ombre. Thus it had all the appearance of finality.

As the years passed, the incompatibility of poetry and political power seemed demonstrated. Then the tide of intellectual opinion in Africa began to turn against the cultural theory of Négritude which Senghor had assiduously elaborated in speeches and essays. Through the sixties as the political spectrum formed by the new states in Africa grew clear, Senghor appeared rather to the right. His interest and influence hardly seemed to reach English-speaking Africa, and the poet of Chaka had little to say about the south. At the Second International Conference of Africanists in Dakar in the late 60s he spoke of the political problems of Africa as having been solved, leaving only social and cultural problems to be tackled. Later in 1972 he was advocating dialogue with South Africa, long before this became politically respectable. Senghor's poetry was, in some parts of Africa at least, as suspect as his politics: but not therefore neglected, for the meteoric rise of African literature as an academic subject and the expansion of French studies in English-speaking Africa were bound to make much of an oeuvre which had the advantages of being substantial and evidently complete.

Then in 1973 appeared, simultaneously under the imprint of Seuil in Paris and Nouvelles Editions Africaines in Dakar, Senghor's first volume of new poems since Ethiopiques, seventeen years before. The title, Lettres d'Hivernage (Letters of the Rainy Season).² It has now been incorporated into, and is most easily accessible in a second, paper-back edition of the complete Pomés.

Asked in an interview the same year how he was able to reconcile his two roles, Senghor replied:

One complements the other. I've always liked to have several projects on the go at once, and everything interpenetrating. It's a matter of organizing one's time practically.

I work on poems during my holidays—that's about six weeks a year—especially in the summer when I take off a whole month. During the rest of the year I draft out poems, make notes, write versets—and, more important, I live my poems. At the moment I'm living an Elegy for the Queen of Sheba. Then when I have a bit of time to myself, I get down to it. Living my poems, that means imagining them. Then the poem inside me grows richer and richer in images. It feeds on my ideas and feelings.³

The practical man of affairs can make arrangements to accommodate the composer of versets. But has the poet survived the long reign of the secular prince? I think on the evidence of Lettres d'Hivernage that he has. The years have not transformed Senghor's poetry. There is no radical difference in technique, in subject matter or mood. But these new poems are not vapid self-imitations—even if they seem full of specific reference to the earlier poems, as though for Senghor himself these now have a kind of classical status. These poems add to and enrich although they do not transform or compel a complete reassessment of Senghor's poetic achievement.

Lettres d'Hivernage is a sequence of thirty poems. In length, and in the relation of the separate poems to the sequence, it resembles the Chants pour Naëtt, poems which Senghor wrote to his first wife. But in theme and also in imagery, especially in the contrasted images of Africa and Northern—or at least non-Mediterranean—Europe, they are much closer to the set of six poems in Ethiopiques entitled Epîtres a la Princesse. In these poems the poet addresses a European princess from whom he is separated by his responsibilities in Africa. These Epîtres have usually been interpreted as a celebration in poetry of Senghor's love for the woman who was to become his second wife. Yet the circumstances are not directly presented. Senghor gives himself the persona of a traditional, tribal, almost patriarchal ruler, owing more probably to Saint-John Perse's Anabase, than to his own earliest memories of Africa and a far cry from the incisive leader of a mass party which at the time he was; and his lady is some snow princess from a Nordic fairy-tale. The sequence ends with a poem entitled "The Death of the Princess." These longer, mythologically elaborate Epîtres or epistles have become simple letters, much concerned in content with waiting for, receiving, and sending letters. They are thus tender poems of an aging man to his wife, written during periods of separation. The background, though other resounding landscapes also occur, is often simply Dakar itself with its view of the He de Gor e lying just off shore and the poet seems to see his scenery not from camelback as once but through the windows of descending aircraft or helicopters.

An example of one of the briefest of these poems will give the quality.

     Ta Lettre sur le Drap

Ta lettre sur le drap, sous la lampe odorante
Bleue comme la chemise neuve que lisse le jeune homme
En chantonnant, comme le ciel et la mer et mon rêve
Ta lettre. Et la mer a son sel, et I'air le lait le pain le riz, je dis son sel
La vie contient sa sève, et la terre son sens
Le sens de Dieu et son mouvement.
Ta lettre sans quoi la vie ne serait pas vie
Tes lèvres mon sel mon soleil, mon air frais et ma neige.
(Your letter on the sheet, beneath the sweet-smelling lamp,
Blue as a new shirt a young man smooths,
Humming to himself; as the sky and the sea and my dream
Your letter. And the sea has its salt, and the air milk, bread, rice, I say its salt
Life holds its sap and earth its meaning
The meaning of God and his movement.
Your letter life would not be life without
Your lips my salt my sun, my fresh air and my snow.)

There is much in the Lettres d'Hivernage that is pitched more eloquently and elaborately than this, and passages which could be taken as coming from the earlier volumes. Yet the comparative simplification of manner found in "Ta Lettre sur le Drap" is characteristic of Lettres d'Hivernage as a whole. The difference does not amount to a change of poetic manner. Senghor is writing in a less dense and overgrown area of his familiar wood, but he has certainly not gone seeking fresh woods. From the immediate experience in sensation—in this poem not an emotion but something seen, a still life, the blue notepaper lying on the white sheet under the lamp—the poet moves with a directness that might seem self-assured or merely facile, to the stark lists of nouns which are like a basic inventory of the cosmos. The poet, to affirm his love, affirms succinctly because urgently the whole human and natural universe in which he lives and breathes and is. Some of the words he uses—for example, sun and snow—have a special, as well as the more general, significance from the theme of the whole poetic sequence. But still, the elements are named, invoked, or as it were implicated (as when a person is named in a legal enquiry), not merely referred to. Here the process is so abrupt that it is unmistakable but it is the same process—the transition from the immediate and personal to the cosmic by way of a naming and implication, which on a larger scale and to the accompaniment of a more decorative rhetoric is found throughout Senghor's work.

It is not difficult to relate this structure in Senghor's poetry to the French poetry of his time. French critics see Senghor's poetry as deeply influenced by Paul Claudel whose most important single poetic collection, the Cinq Grandes Odes appeared in 1910. Senghor has never denied this debt. Signs of his familiarity not only with Claudel's poetry but his thought about the nature of poetry are evident everywhere in Senghor's work. The other major influence is Saint-John Perse. Here Senghor insists that he had read no work of this poet until 1945 when all the poems that were to appear in Chants d'Ombre and Hosties Noires were already written, but that on his reading of Saint-John Perse's poem "Exit" in that year, he was 'struck blind like Paul on the road to Damascus'.⁴

Senghor himself stresses the variety of his sources. 'I have read a great deal from the troubadors to Paul Claudel—and imitated a great deal.'⁵ Senghor reads English and knew the work of the black American poets of the 1920s and 30s. In 1948 he edited the important Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. This anthology of work by black poets writing in French was mainly Caribbean. Most of Senghor's critical writing is an attempt to characterize this black poetry rather than to examine the nature of his own poetic inspiration. There are throughout Senghor's poems allusions to and imitations of other black poets. In one of the poems in Lettres d'Hivernage there is the following scrap of dialogue:

—Fais que toujours tu me sois joie, mon Prince mon Athlete et mon ébène.
—Point n'ai pris habitude des promesses; je sais oui mon amour de toi

—(See that forever you may be joy to me, my Prince, my Athlete, my Ebony.
—Never have I caught the habit of promises: I know Yes my love of thee.)6

This catches the flavour of the Vieilles Chansons of the Madagascan poet Rabéarivelo, themselves adaptations into French of the Madagascan folk poetry of the Hain-teny. Senghor had already made a similar imitation in his "Elégie des Saudades" in Nocturnes.

Yet these are hommages to other poets. They do not affect the texture of Senghor's own poetry. It is natural to be led, in the critical examination of Senghor's poetry, by what he says in his own criticism about the nature of 'black poetry'. Yet Senghor's thought about his poetry, as distinct from his practice as a poet, has found its literary associations not in the tradition of Claudel, but, in what in the 1920s and 30s when Senghor lived in Paris was the most avant garde and revolutionary movement of poetry, with surrealism. In Senghor's exposition of black poetry it is Aimé Césaire's and not Senghor's own poetry which is the central model. Even when he is writing about traditional poetry in African languages Senghor seems to interpret its qualities through the critical vocabulary of surrealism: These qualities which he finds in traditional African poetry and in the new black poets (who, he asserts, have only been enabled to express Négritude in the French language because of the surrealist revolution⁷), the violent image, the disintegration of the phrase, the destruction of syntax, elimination of tool-words or connectives, are none of them characteristic of Senghor's own verse. Here and there in Senghor there may occur a passage of pastiche surrealism but Senghor's violence to language characteristically goes no further than

sous les cris blancs des mouettes
(beneath the white cries of the gulls).8

And in Senghor the omission of tool-words amounts to no more than a fondness for omitting and between nouns. Sometimes there are syntactical ambiguities in Senghor, as in all poetry and indeed all speech. In "Ta Lettre sur le Drap" the fourth line might seem to be devoid of all syntax, permitting us to arrange the words together, to allow them to interact with each other as we wish. But a closer look reveals that there is nothing more extreme here than the omission of commas between the items of a list and having the verb have understood and not repeated in the second clause. This is as natural in French as it would be in English.

Significantly it is in an article on Saint-John Perse that Senghor seems to clarify the distinctness of his own kind of poetry from that of surrealism. The article appeared in La Table Ronde in 1962—after the publication of Senghor's main volumes. In this article he notes that Saint-John Perse's poetry is a tissue of images or symbols. Symbols, uttered by speech, are an elucidation, an order. Through them, the poet, who is 'Ordinateur et Ordonnateur'—one who both sets in order and ordains—maintains or restores the order of the world, the ordered world without which man cannot have full existence, since he is, as Teilhard de Chardin says, 'a cosmic being'. But if it can create order, the symbol can also by perversion of its true function sow confusion. The contrast between the images of Saint-John Perse and the surrealists is made:

The images of Saint-John Perse are as new as those of the surrealists. They are more beautiful. Why? Because they are clothed in the grace of language. Because they are more taking, gripping you at the very root of being. Because they are not gratuitous. They share in the truth of the archetypal images laid down in the depths of Man's Collective Soul.⁹

The surrealists were without the grace of language because language was one of the objects of their destructive rage, a social institution to be swept away with the rest of an oppressive social order for the total liberation of the individual. The link between surrealism and black poetry is a common interest in revolution—but a revolution which swept away civilization and technology would be as self-contradictory as a poetry which succeeded in destroying language. Those who do not find with Teilhard de Chardin that man is a cosmic being but for whom 'this is not our place', will not in any case be blessed by 'the grace of language'.

In the same article Senghor identifies poets like Saint-John Perse with the Priests and Magicians of African and traditional civilizations, and the world of his poetry with the articulated symbolic worlds of Africa. This seems to me a mistake, the mistake of using the myth of the poem as the guide to the critical understanding of its true nature. The urge to create a poetry in which the poet himself appears centrally as the Mage, Demiurge or Logos of the poetically summoned cosmos can only arise when the poet has in the social reality of his day no magic powers and there are no more Priest-Kings or Mages whose powers of ordering and maintaining the universe are accepted. The need to make the evocation of the world and the acceptance of it central to poetry only arises when the sense of cosmos has been lost and when rejection instead of acceptance is conceivable.

During the nineteenth century it became possible—and so necessary—for poetry to move beyond the expression of personal experience and personal vision through a shared literary tradition which reflected and ultimately implied a whole, diverse, developing but still shared civilization. Poetry itself would have to assert its own cultural cosmos—the alternatives were to keep traditional poetry going as a kind of folklore, or to be resigned to coterie verse and hermeticism. Of course this cosmos was not a clean creation of the poet's. Just as socially shared cultures depend on the inescapable realities of the natural world and shape the raw material of human psychology, so the poet has to draw and select and shape from the conflicting and incoherent diversity around him. Hence the main poets of this tradition are men like Senghor whose life has been shaped by diversity of cultural experience. Claudel's Cinq Grandes Odes were written mostly in China where he had a diplomatic posting. Saint-John Perse was born and spent his earliest years in Guadeloupe. His mature poetry was written in exile in the United States where he was driven after the fall of France in 1940. The cosmos of the poem depends on the assertion of the poet. He is at its centre and he has to create for himself a persona of a kind that does not appear in earlier poetry. The cosmos of the poem is also the world of the poet's own experience, is indeed the medium through which his own experience can find coherence, meaning and hence expression. Thus he cannot abandon his real self in the poem and adopt a purely formal or mythic role. At the same time he has to assume inside the cosmos of the poem the central, princely, demiurgic role.

The kind of poetry we have been describing was first created by Walt Whitman, working in the cultural diversity and unrooted quality of American life, and with only a trivial poetic tradition to break free of. The strange quality of the 'I' figure in Whitman's poetry, firmly identified by name and experience with the real man, yet also functioning in the poems as a kind of Son of Man, has engaged much attention from the critics. The poems, out of widely varied sources in Whitman's reading and experience, by listing, naming, evocation, assert a universe. The poetry created great interest in Europe, especially in France where the American experience was more likely to be understood than in England with its traditional continuities unbroken by recent revolutionary change. Whitman's breakthrough made a new, more powerful poetry available but only where individual genius and a certain set of conditions occurred. What is common to all is that the poet asserts his own universe. We should not expect the universes to look alike. Whitman's is democratic, libertarian, ordered by opportunity not hierarchy; both Claudel's and Saint-John Perse's are aristocratic and exclusive. Senghor's cosmos shows great similarities to the two French poets who are not only direct influences but created their poetic worlds out of material that overlaps directly with his own. Senghor observes that Saint-John Perse like Senghor himself spent his childhood in the black world. Yet in some ways Senghor comes closer to Whitman's inclusiveness than either of his French predecessors. I think we should see his poetry as much in its place within this modern supranational tradition belonging to the times of the melting pot, of interacting and conflicting cultures, as belonging to French poetry or to African poetry.

Senghor's poetry asserts a universe on the poet's authority, a universe which is an ordering and an ordination of African, Mediterranean, Gallic, Catholic, Islamic elements. At the centre of these is the 'I' of Senghor himself, a figure both mythic and actual. Senghor has never confused the princely role he plays in his own poetry with his own political position and nor should his readers. Yet his own personal experience is central to the cosmos of his poems. The two guiding experiences of Senghor's poetry are imprisonment—the poems in "Camp 1940" and in a sense the whole of the collection Hosties Noires of which this forms a part—and love. In the Lettres d'Hivernage we can see how personal poetry of a direct kind can rest within the cosmos of the poet's creation and yet through each new occasional poem succeed in articulating it further and in maintaining the rhythm of its connections and correspondences.

Auden said that time would pardon Paul Claudel and his views—'for writing well'. It would certainly be sad if we rejected all the poetry which did not reflect our own views. It would after all cut us off from almost all the poetry of earlier generations. But the point I think is not to go to this kind of poetry looking for views to overlook. Certainly there are in Senghor's work poems which are direct reactions on a public level to political events, poems of protest. "Tyaroye" in Hosties Noires is one of these, though no one I think is likely to raise objections to the views it expresses. But my suggestion is that poetry like Whitman's, Claudel's, Senghor's does not, except incidentally, express views. It asserts not opinions or doctrines but a cosmos. Among the elements of that cosmos there may be doctrines and opinions. With the advent of Whitman the poet surrenders the role of teacher—or becomes as Whitman says, the teacher of 'no lesson'. We can only teach within the settled conventions of a stable and accepted culture.

I have tried to suggest a description of the kind of poetry to which I think Senghor's belongs. I have no theory of the way this poetry works on the reader, of the nature of the delight that comes from reading Whitman or Claudel or Senghor except that taking them together, the soothing of our political opinions cannot be any part of it. Some lines from Whitman do not provide that missing theory but may perhaps illustrate the delight.

The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life and everything else,

They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes

…..

Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.¹⁰

Notes

¹ Armand Guibert. Leopold Sédar Sénghor (Poètes d'aujourd'hui, Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1961), p. 96.

²Lettres d'Hivernage (illustrations originales de Marc Chagall, Paris: Seuil, 1973 and Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1973).

³ Interview with René Minguet, published in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 17-23 December 1973.

⁴Comme les lamantins vont boire à la source, Postface to Ethiopiques (Paris: Seuil, 1956), p. 106.

⁵Ibid, p. 106.

⁶Ta Lettre Trémulation.

⁷ 'L'Apport de la Poésie Nègre au Demi-Siècle', in Liberté l: Négritude et Humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 143.

⁸Je Repasse, Lettres d'Hivernage.

⁹ 'Saint-John Perse ou Poésie du Royaume d' Enfance', in Liberté l: Négritude et Humanisme. p. 343.

¹⁰ From 'Song of the Answerer' in Calamus.