Newsweek （review date 27 July 1964）

[In the following review, the critic offers praise for Senghor's Selected Poems.]

When a head of state so much as writes his own speeches, it is news; but when he writes a distinguished volume of poems, it is epochal. How often has it happened since King David?

Léopold Sédar Senghor is the President of the infant African Republic of Senegal, and a prominent theoretician who has contributed to black nationalism the world over one of its key terms and central concepts—négritude. Add to all this the fact that he is Africa's principal poet, and an important contemporary poet by any measure, and it is clear that the 58-year-old Senghor is perhaps the closest figure today to the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king, the political leader who is also a thinker and artist. He is a figure unique in our time: and the American publication of his Selected Poems, translated from the original French, is a major event.

Like Walt Whitman, Senghor taps private sources deep within himself to discover in his experience the consciousness of his people and the drama of his continent. Blackness—“Negroness,” négritude—pervades his poems like ancestral spirits, but it is experienced, not as a stigma or predicament, but as a benefaction and sign of grace. Conquest over despair, acceptance, and pride drive through the poems like a strong river, unifying them by its powerful currents.

Senghor's dialogue with France is a particular version of the black-white encounter. In the earlier poems, the poet feels himself exiled by his blackness, and returns home “seeking to forget Europe in the pastoral heart of Sine.” Lonely, despised in Europe, he returns to his native village to “breathe the smell of our Dead, gather and speak out again their living voice, learn to / Live before I go down, deeper than diver, into the high profundities of sleep.”

In a series of poems written in the '40s, Senghor conquers his “store of hatred against the diplomats who flash their long teeth / And tomorrow will barter black flesh.” In the “Prayer for Peace” he finds that he is able to “pray especially for France,” though the white oppressor “has stolen my children like a brigand … to fatten her cornfields and cottonfields, for the sweat of the Negro is dung.”

The victory is achieved most notably in the brilliantly colored, chanting poems from the more recent volumes, Éthiopiques （1956） and Nocturnes （1961）. In “New York,” a rhapsodic Whitmanesque poem driven by surging, powerfully cadenced lines, he sings the fusion of black and white—the ultimate fulfillment affected by the reconciliation of opposites: “… let the black blood flow into your blood / Cleaning the rust from your steel articulations, like an oil of life / … See, the ancient times come again, unity is rediscovered the reconciliation of the Lion the Bull and the Tree …” The poem ends on a note of consummation and confidence, the voice of the black poet in a black society deeply in possession of himself: “It is enough to open your eyes to the April rainbow / And the ears, above all the ears to God who with a burst of saxophone laughter created the heavens and the earth in six days. / And on the seventh day, he slept his great Negro sleep.”

The final line of the final poem （“Elegy of the Waters”） falls from a crescendo of almost Biblical cadences to a calm climax which may stand as the motto-line for all of Senghor's poems: “And life is born again colour of whatever is.” We may all refresh ourselves by those life-giving waters.