[In the following introduction to Senghor's collected poetry, Dixon summarizes Senghor's life and work, focusing variously on his writings and political career.]

The election of Léopold Sédar Gnilane Senghor to the French Academy in 1983 marked yet another milestone in the fifty-year career of the poet and former president of the Republic of Senegal. He became the first African and the only black intellectual among the forty life members of the 349-year-old Academy. Widely respected in France as an association of the most distinguished intellectuals, the Academy monitors the growth of the French language by compiling a dictionary of acceptable new words and usage. Senghor's admission to this august body of writers and scholars represents more than the personal triumph of a single poet. It signals the now irrefutable fact that the vitality of the French language is no longer the responsibility of Europeans alone but also of those who shape a living language wherever it is spoken and written, including parts of the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and the Orient. Francophone writers now would be seen as helping to promote the French language without compromising their ethnicity or forfeiting their nationality. Thus, as an African writing in French, Senghor continues to achieve literary recognition and acclaim.

In his speech on the occasion of his induction into the Academy, Senghor followed custom by eulogizing his predecessor, the historian Antoine de Lévis-Mirepois. Senghor argued that Lévis-Mirepois's contributions to history connected France to the development of the Third World through cultural and biological cross-fertilization. “France offers a model of biological and cultural symbiosis,” Senghor remarked. “From century to century here and abroad France adopts values that at first appear foreign. Then she assimilates them to create a new form of civilization, moving toward the universal.” No doubt Senghor was speaking for his own view that the present honor for him was one actually bestowed upon black Africa itself, a sentiment confirmed in remarks made by the Academy's president, Edgar Faure, who hailed Senghor as “incarnating the life of Senegal but also the life of Africa and of the world.”¹

In an interview before his induction, Senghor commented, “My election to the French Academy is in part recognition of the fact that we are creating a new literature.” And he stated his goal for the Academy: “I am going to work on what I call the ‘crossbreeding’ of the French language. As a result of colonization in each francophone territory, be it Quebec, Senegal, or Madagascar, we invented new words and new expressions to enrich the French language.”²

This mission of cultural revitalization is not new for Senghor. It has been at the heart of his literary and political philosophy since he began publishing poetry in Parisian literary reviews during the late 1930s. His now famous dictum, “assimilate, but don't be assimilated” suggested ways for Africa and Europe to encounter and enrich each other without losing either cultural identity. Senghor often credits the linguist Paul Rivet with teaching him that all great civilizations in history, from ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Americas, have been “civilizations of mixed-bloods, biologically and culturally.”³

Throughout his poetry, from the first volume, Shadow Songs (Chants d'ombre), in 1945 to the major elegies published individually during the seventies, Senghor has taken his readers on a three-part journey to show how African culture is an important element of world civilization. The first part involves a recognition of blackness and African heritage in which the ethnic self is celebrated. The second part places Africa in dynamic relation to Europe through the poet's own activities and cultural awareness: hence his interest in the process of cross-fertilization. Third, the poet argues for universality that grows out of the earlier stages of mutual cultural recognition. In this way Senghor echoes a concern of many African-American writers who have long viewed black culture, not as a beneficiary of, but as a contributor to civilization.

As early as the turn of the century, William E. B. Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the goal of the black man in the modern world is to become “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.”⁴ Du Bois's mythic language prefigures many of Senghor's poetic references aimed at recovering the dispersed African past. And Senghor goes as far as to include Du Bois in his long poem “Elegy for Martin Luther King.” For Senghor, however, entering the kingdom of culture begins by remembering the past. History reveals to him that one gateway to African revitalization is through the Childhood Kingdom.

Born in 1906, Senghor embodies much of the multicultural character of Senegal, which is home to many ethnic groups such as the Wolof, Jola, Dyula, Serer, Toucouleur, Fulani, and Manding. Geographically, Senegal is the westernmost sub-Saharan African country, neighboring Mauritania to the north and Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia to the south. Senghor was born in the small village of Joal in the Sine-Saloum region along the Atlantic coast, about seventy miles south of Dakar, the capital city. The Sine-Saloum is a region of lowlands and islands formed at the point where the separate Sine and Saloum rivers join before flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. The region is populated primarily by Serers, a term that encompasses several ethnicities including the Malinké, who intermarried with Serer nobility when the latter group migrated after being driven out of the Senegal River valley in the north.

Senghor's father was Basile Diogoye Senghor, a Malinké whose ancestors came from the southern Gabou region (in what is now Guinea-Bissau) and who was a successful landowner and trader in livestock and peanuts. His mother was Gnilane Bakhoum, from a Christian Fulani family in nearby Djilas, but who insisted, according to Senghor, on being regarded as a “pure Serer.” He was given the European name Léopold by his parents, who were as much steeped in Serer culture as in the Catholic faith. The family name Senghor is believed to be a variant of the Portuguese term senhor (“Mister”). Sédar, from Serer, means “he who can't be humiliated” or “he who can't be made to feel ashamed.”

Senghor's childhood was spent with his immediate family, which included his father's four wives and his twenty-four siblings. He was also raised by his maternal uncle, Waly Bakhoum. Senghor credits his uncle, called Tokô'Waly in the poetry, with instructing him in rural Serer traditions. Matrilineal custom among the Serer dictated that nobility derived from one's maternal lineage. “C'est le ventre qui est noble” (The womb is noble). It is the mother not the father who bestows status.

The poet acknowledges his father's part in instilling a sense of social and public duty and teaching him the traditional values of jom (honor) and kersa (discretion and self-mastery). But Senghor reserves particular praise for his uncle's moral and religious instruction. “It was my uncle who took me to the tombs to offer libations. When I was ill, he saw to it that I was healed. I was an animist all the way. My entire intellectual, moral, religious universe was animist, and it made a lasting impression on me.”⁵ Not only does Senghor offer Tokô'Waly a place in his long autobiographical poem “To the Music of Koras and Balaphon,” he also reveals in his frequent references to the Childhood Kingdom the kind of legacy he seeks to create as well as the overriding metaphor he establishes for the enduring beauty of his African heritage.

For Senghor the Childhood Kingdom represents the comfort of a solid family support, and it allows him to embrace elements of a primal imagination; he recaptures the sounds, smells, colors, and events that formed him. The exuberance of this imagery in Senghor's poetry has the same effect as the language in Wole Soyinka's prose memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981). Senghor's recognition of these features in his past provided a source of defense when he faced general European ignorance about Africa or the prevailing notion that Africans simply had no indigenous culture. The metaphor of the Childhood Kingdom as well as Senghor's deliberate memory of key cultural figures in his past—the royal court of King Koumba Ndofène Diouf and the celebrated woman poet of oral tradition Marône Ndiaye—show Senghor's aim to be, not nostalgia for a lost era, but a structured return to his ethnic roots for sustenance and meaning. As Senghor described it to Mohamed Aziza, the Childhood Kingdom “is a realm of innocence and happiness. There were no borders between the Dead and the Living, between reality and fiction, between present, past, and future. During my adventures with the shepherd boys, we would speak of the Living and the Dead as if they were right there beside us. We'd talk to them. At noon, the most solemn time of the day, we believed we could actually see the year's Dead marching along the salt flats.”⁶ The key notions of the fluidity of time and the proximity and presence of ancestors are central to many traditional African beliefs. In this metaphor of childhood, Senghor is actually instructing us about several features of Serer culture.

Another persistent memory reveals traditional modes of respect and hospitality. Senghor remembers that his father was frequently visited by Koumba Ndofène Diouf, the last reigning king of the region, whose visits were formal occasions. The king would arrive “on horseback surrounded by four troubadours also on horseback who would sing his praises accompanied by talking drums. … This memory gave me the strongest impression that there was a black African civilization, one that has marked me indelibly.”⁷ Here memory becomes the key to unlock and preserve a usable past.

At the age of seven Senghor was sent to a Catholic mission school, St. Joseph of Ngasobil, established by the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. It was here that he learned to speak French for the first time. After primary school, Senghor was sent to Dakar to study at Libermann Seminary, where he hoped to begin studies to become a priest. When he was dissuaded from continuing seminary studies, he enrolled in the secondary school best known as Lycée Van Vollenhoven. Still he felt torn about his desire to enter the clergy. “I was strongly attracted to two careers: a priest and a teacher. Finally at the end of my primary studies, I decided not to decide. I decided, in effect, to become both a priest and a teacher.”⁸ Of course it wasn't until Senghor started writing poetry that he satisfied both interests. He was able both to instruct his audience about Africa and to offer such prayers and blessings that allowed him to practice, if not officiate in, his religion. Note that many poems begin with an invocation to the Lord (“Snow in Paris”), and many stanzas either recreate the form of a prayer, as in “Prayer for Peace,” or depend heavily on biblical imagery, including many references to Eden, the Paschal Lamb, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Prodigal Son. Through the power of the spoken and written word the poet becomes priest and professor.

When Senghor completed his Baccalauréat in 1927, he received a scholarship that enabled him to do further study in France. He left for Paris in 1928 and enrolled at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. There he met classmates who were to become lifelong friends: Louis Achille, Georges Pompidou, and Pham Duy Khiem. Senghor, however, was merely a French subject rather than a citizen, since he was born in Joal and not in the Four Communes (Dakar, Rufisque, Gorée, and Saint-Louis), where French citizenship was accorded automatically. He gained citizenship in time to complete his university studies and was successful in the rigorous and highly competitive agrégation de l'Université exam, which selects teachers for the national network of secondary schools, the lycées, and the universities. He was, in 1935, the very first African to do so.

Later, he held various teaching positions and completed his obligatory French military service. Yet he was unprepared for the widening impact of World War II and found himself drafted into the 3rd Regiment of the Colonial Infantry, where he fought against the Germans at La Charité-sur-Loire. He was taken prisoner in 1940 and spent close to two years in a camp where many of the poems in Black Hosts (Hosties noires) were written.

Before the trauma and upheaval of war, Senghor enjoyed the period of the thirties as a time of much intellectual ferment. Louis Achille introduced him to the work of African-American poets and to the many West Indian students then in Paris seeking some expression and validation of their racial and cultural differences. Paulette and Jane Nardal began the controversial La revue du monde noir (Review of the black world) in 1931 and set the stage for the beginning of a new literary movement that recognized the value of black experiences throughout the world.

The Nardal sisters were the unsung heroines of the negritude movement, midwives to the birth of black consciousness in French literature. Their story has not been fully told, but without their journal, which published material in French and in English, much of the international vitality of negritude would have been lost. Negritude was not a term used by the journal, but a message of black consciousness and solidarity was the journal's explicit goal.

An exact definition of negritude is hard to come by. The term was first coined by Aimé Césaire, the poet from Martinique who explored some of its implications in his long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; Notebook of a return to the native land). The range of definitions goes from one most succinctly expressed as “the search for universal black values”⁹ to Senghor's often elaborate statements. Césaire has drawn his understanding of negritude within the literary realm as a mode of racial exploration in language. Senghor, on the other hand, has been criticized for being too vague about negritude and enlarging the concept to an unwieldy political ideology. Yet Senghor has never stopped defining negritude. In his latest book, Ce que je crois (What I believe, 1988), he proffers yet another meaning: “The totality of values of black civilization.” He goes on to acknowledge that negritude “has evolved as part of the struggle for liberation from the chains of cultural colonization in favor of a new humanism.”¹⁰ Finally, negritude involves a certain will to assert black consciousness and to explore its multiple forms of artistic and political expression.

For Senghor the discovery and celebration of black cultural values was hardly a provincial undertaking. Rather, it connected him to the search for and fulfillment of universality. His intellectual development ranged from reading influential poets such as Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, and Saint-John Perse to studying ethnographers such as the German scholar Leo Frobenius, whose early work recognized the existence and importance of African culture. The work of these European scholars and poets established a climate in which both Senghor and Césaire could find scholarly and artistic support for their developing ideas.

Senghor is best known today for giving the term negritude wide application, but he came very close to devaluing its currency. His search for the essence of cultural specificity has led him to seek common ground with other diverse ethnic elements, linking blackness to Frenchness and Arabness, what he calls francité and arabité. And he has allowed discussions of negritude to come dangerously close to validating racial stereotypes and advocating what Jean-Paul Sartre once called “an anti-racist racism.”¹¹

For Senghor the power of negritude lies in the power of utterance; it is a call into being of the black presence in the modern world. This impulse seems to me to be less African than American, for it depends on the existence of other voices, or at least multiple voices, to which the black writer contributes his or her identity and group membership. In reviewing the literary history of the negritude movement, I am struck by the fact that the principal architects of negritude were primarily from the Western Hemisphere—not only Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire, poets from French Guiana and Martinique respectively, but also Paulette and Jane Nardal and René Maran from the French Antilles and Claude McKay from Jamaica.

Senghor invokes these names along with those of African-American poets of the twenties such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown when he documents the beginning of negritude. Both Senghor and the Nardal sisters state clearly their debt to Harlem Renaissance writers, some of whose work appeared in La revue du monde noir, long after their initial yearning for black consciousness in literature was born during the twenties.

Negritude, I would argue, is essentially an American or multicultural phenomenon. It is a call for the recognition of blackness and black cultural values rather than a redefinition of race or politics. Perhaps this is one reason why so many African writers from Wole Soyinka of Nigeria to Ezekiel Mphahlele of South Africa have taken issue with Senghor. If Senghor has few followers today, it is perhaps because the method of negritude or assimilationist poetry he practiced reached its height or realized its full range of expression with him. The lyrical vocabulary Senghor pulls from his African past merges with his European present. Note that the most powerful African elements in Senghor's poetry are in fact images from the past rather than verbal constructions of a present reality: the past in its lush, abundant, luxuriant, and erotic diction. The present—at least his life in Europe from 1928 until 1960—draws upon the cultural alienation and complexity he experienced in Paris: the glass tower in “In Memoriam,” the trenches in the Luxembourg Gardens that bring the reality of the war painfully home, the screeching taxis, the rain-soaked Parisian roofs. The present reality in Senghor's poems evokes images of loss and estrangement rather than fulfillment and wonder such as those found in “To the Music of Koras and Balaphon.”

Senghor's African-based poems, such as “The Message,” are often meditations on history, and even the highly sensual and provocative imagery in “Black Woman” depends on historical allusions to create a positive and full-bodied depiction of black femininity. Take away the historical references—without the insistence on childhood—and very little in the poem offers a contemporary revitalization of Africa, but the poem provides instead a modern reconstruction of blackness for intercultural consumption.

Senghor, ever the teacher and priest, instructs and prepares his audience to receive blackness. This gesture denies the natural acceptance of Africanness inherent in much of African literature. Senghor's poetic method depends on the otherness of his audience—or at least the environment of cultural differences—to which he introduces and recasts race. Senghor's reach for cross-culturalism becomes his practice of universality.

What is most exciting about Senghor's poetry is the way the poems document his literary development. From the early poems in Shadow Songs (1945), we begin to see how artfully Senghor grapples with issues of self in relation to traditional African society. The opening scene in “In Memoriam” finds the young poet on the second of November, the day after All Saints' Day, unable to honor his dead or to feel an easy solidarity at first with the whites around him. As he remembers his past in this and subsequent poems, he uncovers those aspects of his rural family life that enable him to articulate his identity. “Night in Sine” provides a telling journey into the homeland where the speaker is visited by ancestral voices, and they help him resolve to plunge into the depths of life. “To the Music of Koras and Balaphon” uses Senegalese musical instruments to chart an autobiographical journey, one that enables the speaker to confront the difficulties inherent in self-exile as expressed in the concluding poem “Return of the Prodigal Son.” The motif of exile and return shapes the themes of Senghor's first book as well as announces the poet's strategy for recovering the racial self in subsequent volumes.

The poet's concern for his intellectual development has not escaped the attention of critics such as Sylvia Washington Bâ and Jacques Louis Hymans, both of whom suggest that close biographical readings of the poems yield rich cultural references and the evidence of Senghor's penchant for scholarship. Hymans suggests that Senghor's interest in defining the importance and impact of place on personality led to his reading of Maurice Barrès, whose book Les déracinés (The uprooted, 1922) discussed the importance of heritage no matter how provincial one's background appeared. Senghor admits that reading Barrès aided his search for cultural authenticity and encouraged his willing embrace of childhood place and perspectives. Hymans argues, “Senghor felt the need to root himself in his native Serer soil; he remembered the Dead that he had left behind him.” Bâ has documented Senghor's reliance on recovering sensuality, even to the point of his seeing love as a cosmic phenomenon.¹² Many of these impulses are readily discernible in Shadow Songs, where the poetic language is open enough to entice the reader's participation in discovering African vitality.

A somber, almost accusatory tone takes over in Senghor's second volume, Black Hosts, when he insists on seeing Senegalese soldiers as sacrificial figures on the altar of European political interests. Senghor's rage is strong, especially when his speaker reveals his natural distrust of politicians and officialdom and declares himself better able to voice both the frustrations of the soldiers and the right homage to them: “Who can praise you if not your brother-in-arms, your brother in blood?” He resolves not to allow official “words of scornful praise secretly [to] bury you.” But this rebellion in language cannot mask the fact that the poet has a double voice (“Am I not divided enough?”), for without his praise of Senegalese bravery in the French language there would be none; yet he, like the soldiers, is a constant victim of scorn and only grudging recognition, if any at all.

War also brings Senghor to an awareness of European divisiveness and a broad black identity when he comes into contact with African-American soldiers and when he shares a prison experience with other Africans. In the poem “Governor Eboué,” dedicated to the sons of Félix Eboué, the leading black statesman who was governor-general of French Equatorial Africa, Senghor found kindred spirits and more. He married Eboué's daughter Ginette in 1946, and they had two sons.

The mood shifts from rage to reconciliation in later poems in Black Hosts, and the collection ends on a startling note. In “Prayer for Peace” Senghor offers this jolting meditation: “Lord God, forgive white Europe!” The poem attempts to deal with the speaker's denial of France's cruelty during the war years and after, since the poem is dated 1945. “Oh, Lord, take from my memory France that is not France, / This mask of meanness and hate on the face of France.” Clearly Senghor is troubled. He offers the prayer for reconciliation that leaves its attainment uncertain.

The racial and spiritual discord Senghor felt in the late forties coincided with his increased political activity and his growing estrangement and subsequent divorce from his wife. In 1949 he was elected to the European Assembly at Strasbourg and was well on his way to greater activity in a number of political groups and parties. Even as the intellectual climate gradually began to favor independence, Senghor was not at first a proponent of African nationalism. Only much later in the movement for African independence did Senghor come around to champion a full break with France.

In 1948 he published the landmark text Anthologie de la nouvelle poèsie négre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of the new black and Malagasy poetry in the French language). The book became an instant success, not because of the many excellent black poets featured, but because Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction, “Orphée Noir,” generated much interest, more for Sartre than for the poets. Soliciting a contribution from Sartre was a brilliant ploy by Senghor to ensure a wide readership for the anthology (it has never gone out of print), particularly since Léon Damas published a similar anthology in 1945 that received scant attention.

By the time Ethiopiques appeared in 1956, Senghor's poetry had enlarged its references to include such terms as “cinnamon apple” and “Foreigner with clear eyes.” His poem “The Kaya-Magan” identifies its speaker as being “both sides of a double door.” The doubleness no longer suggests alienation or division, but a yearning to merge his African past with a European future. In 1957 Senghor married Colette Hubert of Normandy. Their only child, Philippe-Maguilen Senghor, was killed many years later in a car accident. Throughout this volume, the themes of love and separation in language rich in African mythology and primordial sensuality suggest the slow fulfillment of passion. References to “the sap rising” in the throat and the enticing presence of “young girls with protruding breasts” in “The Absent Woman” set the stage for the dramatic poem “Shaka,” which explores both the Zulu leader's passion for his lover, Nolivé, whom he kills, and his political struggle against whites. Passion and politics became the key figures for Senghor's doubleness. Four years later, in 1960, after much political involvement he became president of the new Republic of Senegal.

Nocturnes (1961) is a difficult volume because the first poems were part of an earlier publication called Chants pour Naëtt (Songs for Naett, 1949), written ostensibly for Ginette, his first wife. When Senghor altered the title to Chants pour signare (Songs for signare), he invited a historical and modern reading of the text. The poems praise black and white women, Ginette and Colette, and the use of the historically specific term signare suggests a merger of the two actual women, for a signare was an aristocratic mulatto woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who was usually kept as a mistress by French military personnel, much like the quadroon or octoroon woman who appeared in Louisiana and other parts of the American South. The use of signare allows Senghor to express love without fully alienating the women praised in “Black Woman” in Shadow Songs: “Dressed in your color that is life, in your form that is beauty!”

Nocturnes returns us to the beauty of night and nature. In the elegies that close the volume, Senghor invites us to consider the relations of the landscape to the harshness and splendor of nature. In “Elegy of the Waters” the speaker becomes a rainmaker when he commands nature to shower upon the parched land. The volume ends with a dramatic poem in praise of Aynina Fall, who led striking workers to protest the harsh conditions of labor in the construction of a railroad.

The group of poems that follow Nocturnes as Selected Poems represents some of Senghor's apprentice poems that were unpublished for a long time until they appeared in a small book on Senghor by Armand Guibert in 1961. The last poem, “Garden of France,” shows Senghor appropriating the radical style of Léon Damas, whose poem “Ils sont venus ce soir” (They came tonight), which is dedicated to Senghor, breaks free from the traditional stanza and almost walks across the page, like an approaching menace:

Ils sont venus ce soir où le
tam
                    tam
                              roulait de
                                                                      rythme
                                                                                                    en
                                                                                                              rythme
                                                                                                                                            la frénésie(13)
They came tonight as the
tom
                    tom
                              sounded the frenzy
                                                                                                              from
                                                                                                                        beat
                                                                                                                                            to
                                                                                                                                                      beat

Senghor's version is less ominous and gives to nature what Damas attributes to man:

But the tom-tom's call
                                                                                          leaps
                                                                                                              from mountains
                                                                                                                                  and continents,
And what will appease my heart,
At the call of the tom-tom
                                                                                                    leaping,
                                                                                                                        throbbing
                                                                                                                                                      passionately?

Most of the poems in Selected Poems have uncharacteristically short lines and a compressed form, although some subjects are similar to the fully realized themes in Senghor's longer poems.

Taken together, Letters in the Season of Hivernage (1972) and Major Elegies return us to Senghor's doubleness; this time, however, a conflict emerges between the very private language and sentiment in Letters and the public voice in Elegies. These poems were written during the time Senghor served as president of Senegal. The loneliness of that office and the moments of separation between husband and wife are revealed in Senghor's use of light imagery. It symbolizes the distance between the presidential residence high on a cliff overlooking the beach at Anse Bernard in Dakar and the great Atlantic Ocean where the Island of Gorée can be seen.

The speaker in the poems muses over letters exchanged between him and his beloved. He measures his moods by the changing light that reveals and conceals the jagged landscape and the haunting presence of Gorée in its ambiguous beauty. Gorée is a small island of less than a hundred or so tiled-roof houses with pastel-colored walls and bordered with multi-colored bougainvillea. Within this deceptively tranquil beauty lies the slave house where Africans were imprisoned before being transported across the Atlantic. At the other end of the island is Fort Castrées, used for some military exercises and storage during World War II. Gorée represents the vicissitudes of Senegal's long past (including the presence of the regal signare women) and, for the solitary speaker, the mystery of its changing light as in “Your Night, My Night”:

Daylight trembles on the Island's white walls and terraces
To the splendid twilight concert of birds.
Look at the night descending on Gorée, dressed in old
          pink
Like signare women used to be at the door to the Grand Ball.
The night descends on the calm island,
And lamps are lit.

The changing light reveals the passage of time and the coming of hivernage as a period of human aging and retreat. Some poems describe air travel between France and Senegal when the great finger of the Cape Verde peninsula seems to pierce the raging seascape. Other poems contrast the serenity of the small coastal village of Popenguine with the hectic activity in urban Dakar. Hivernage, as Senghor hints in the volume's prefatory paragraph, is a time for settling in. One imagines a kind of hibernation. Then, too, comes the realization that one has grown older, and Senghor's most delicate love poetry appears to chronicle this time for men and women. In “You Speak” the tone is realistic and respectful of the effect of hivernage:

You speak about your age and your silky white strands.
Look at your hands, petals of rose laurels, your neck
The only graceful pleat.

.....

But in the heart of the cold season, when the purer curves
Of your face shall appear, your cheeks more hollow, your look
More distant, my Lady, when your skin, your neck,
Your weary body, your thin hands will be streaked
With furrows like winter fields, I will find the treasure
Of my rhythmic quest and the sun behind the long
          anguished night,
The waterfall and the same chant murmuring from your soul.

Here Senghor accomplishes the double meaning of hivernage: seasonal change in nature and in human beings.

The language becomes more public and diffuse in Major Elegies, largely because of the difficulty in expressing and controlling grief. The poet, still the politician, has merged elements of public discourse and oratory with the demands of private emotion. Thematically, the poems drift between past and present, perhaps as a way of mediating the conflict between the public and the private self. “Elegy of the Trade Winds” captures the sweep of time and nature, and “Elegy of Carthage” speaks largely to Greek, Roman, and Arab history. The elegy for Philippe-Maguilen Senghor attempts to control the poet's devastating and inconsolable grief at the loss of his son, who represented a new era. Senghor's inclusion of lines from a Negro spiritual captures the cross-cultural aspects of that new era as well as his reach into whatever survival strategies African-American culture may offer him. The public orator reappears in “Elegy for Martin Luther King,” and here Senghor refers to many American events and personages in his memorial to King.

Attention must be paid to the last elegy, “Elegy for the Queen of Sheba,” for the poem culminates the various themes and subjects from the poet's entire oeuvre and brings together references from Arabic, Hebraic, and African sources. To this end Senghor stated: “In this elegy I wanted to praise what the black woman represents to me better than I had done in ‘Black Woman’. … At the same time I wanted the Queen of Sheba to symbolize Black Africa, love, and poetry.”¹⁴

The texts that comprise Lost Poems offer valuable evidence of Senghor's literary development. According to the author's preface, these poems are not new as such, but were previously unpublished. Taken together with those in Selected Poems, these poems recall the pattern of Senghor's apprenticeship and his debt to a wide range of French and American poets. Senghor's “Spleen” suggests strong links between Baudelaire's trope of melancholy and Langston Hughes's antidote of the blues. Both European and African cultures merge in the poem and demonstrate the persistence of Senghor's quest for broad universality. Jazz music is as central to the energy in “Harlem Riot” as it is in his longer meditation in “New York” in Ethiopiques.

Lost Poems also reveals Senghor's early experimentation with poetic form and rhyme as well as his search for invention and playfulness in language. “To a Dark Girl” with its deliberate English title echoes Countee Cullen's poem “To a Brown Girl.” The rhyme and quatrain form of “Correspondence” reveal Senghor's early interest in the prosody of the truncated sonnet. “Swarms” also attests to Senghor's early experimentation with rhyme, which he would apparently abandon in favor of the metered long line (or verset) that conveys more aptly perhaps the exuberance of African verbal rhythm and sensual imagery. “Nostalgia” echoes in form and theme the more fully developed image in “Pearls” (in Selected Poems) and documents Senghor's inventiveness with language. Senghor's reconsideration of these early poems not only provides the “breath of youth” promised in his Preface but rounds out the elements of his long journey in poetry, a journey that spans well over fifty years of sustained writing and publishing.

On January 1, 1981, Senghor relinquished his office as president. He voluntarily turned power over to his prime minister, Abdou Diouf (who later held elections and was voted into office). It was a dramatic moment of peaceful political transition, but it was also an opportunity for Senghor to leave the world of public discourse, official oratory, and diplomacy and to resume the poet's life of the mind and of art. Years earlier, when Senghor had given up the idea of becoming a scholar and teacher, he reasoned in favor of a life that would preserve his role as a poet. As he revealed to Mohamed Aziza, “I feel that if I had remained a teacher, my poetry would have been gratuitous and more impoverished, for what feeds it is the communal life, the life of my people. In my poetry I certainly express my personal life, but I express myself as a black man, an African.”¹⁵ Now in his eighties, he relishes perhaps the same resolve in resuming not only the writing of poetry but the numerous literary activities that come with his membership in the French Academy. And it is this multivoiced author who has left a long record of his literary life in the poems we enjoy today.

Senghor's uncompromising brilliance as a poet and his masterful lyricism engage his readers fully. As translator, I have been particularly aware of this feature in his poetry and have tried to recreate it in English. One is easily drawn into Senghor's emotional power. He allows the reader to experience the visceral imagery that makes his poetry so alive and meaningful for us today. Senghor creates a language of feeling about African experience. He takes his readers into the culture. His insistence on including African terms in his poetry should be construed, not as an obstacle, but as an enrichment to our reading pleasure. When we encounter and struggle to pronounce unfamiliar terms such as kora, balaphon, signare, and tabala, we participate through language in an African cultural reality that is not static but dynamic in its relation to other cultures, other histories, other selves.

Senghor's importance as a major modern poet is everywhere evident in these collected volumes. Readers are continually struck by his finely crafted and exuberant imagery. His skillful use of olfactory, aural, and visual metaphors encourages us to experience the variety of sensations available to poet and reader. We inhale the fragrances of various flowers, feel the cool trade winds on our sweaty skin, hear the howl of the relentless, dust-laden harmattan winds in December. And we smell the salt in the sea as our eyes take in the many shades of the water's blue and green. Critics have overlooked the significance of Senghor's visceral, sensual, and erotic imagery and his playfulness with language in favor of his ideas. Senghor is indeed concerned about ideas, but not at the expense of feeling. Ideas have their greatest impact when they animate us in the tribulations of love or the various activities of living. If Senghor's poetry makes demands upon readers, it does so to enforce a total immersion into poetry. His images do not beg the issue of universality, they simply become universal by the rich specificity Senghor conveys. Therein lies his enduring gift to us. …

Notes

1. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Discours de remerciement et de réception à l'Académie Française (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 36, 56. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2. Stephen H. Grant, “Léopold Sédar Senghor, Former President of Senegal,” Africa Report (November-December 1983): 62, 63.

3. Léopold Sédar Senghor, La poésie de l'action: Conversations avec Mohamed Aziza (Paris: Stock, 1980), p. 61.

4. William E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet, 1969), p. 46.

5. Senghor, La poésie de l'action, p. 37.

6. Ibid., p. 38.

7. Ibid., p. 34.

8. Ibid., p. 49.

9. See A. James Arnold's comprehensive study Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 12.

10. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1988), pp. 136-37.

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir,” Introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. xl.

12. Jacques Louis Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 25; Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Négritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 52-53. See also Irving Leonard Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Politics of Négritude (New York: Atheneum, 1969). The most recent political biography of Senghor is by Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

13. Léon Damas, Pigments (1937; Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), p. 13.

14. Senghor, La poèsie de l'action, pp. 152-53.

15. Ibid., p. 20. See also Robert Jouanny, Les Voies du lyrisme dans les “Poèmes” de Léopold Sédar Senghor (Chants d'ombre, Hosties noires, Ethiopiques, Nocturnes) (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1986). Jouanny offers a close reading of many poems and documents biographical references. He also provides a useful glossary.