This latent discord that reigns at the heart of each poem: contradiction, the creative principle in Saint-John Perse's manuscripts

Abstract

Unlike the finished poem, Saint-John Perse's hand-written manuscripts look like a battlefield, where a great many contradictory forces and differing tensions are at war. Although the published text hides theses contradictions and tensions under its veil of perfection, they are necessary for meaning to emerge. As a genetic illustration of the Dionysian movement that permeates Saint-John Perse's creative ethos, contradiction reveals itself as a fundamental principle of poetic creation, governing the birth of poetic writing in the manuscripts of Saint-John Perse. Whether it be the result of an analogy of the signifier, creating a semantic opposition between the different variants of a same paradigm, or whether, in the centre of the paradigm, it be a spontaneous translation of the mysterious essence of the poetic experience, which, transgressing logical categories, leads to the limit of expression, contradiction resides at the very origin of Saint-John Perse's creative process, where the semantic tensions reflected in every writing process appear.