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RITUEL ET POESIE: UNE LECTURE DE SAINT-JOHN PERSE BY MARIE-LAURE RYAN (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977 (Utah Studies in Literature and Linguistics, Vol. 8. 174 pages) Professor Ryan studies the developing role of ritual in the poetic works of Saint-John Perse. In his earliest collections, ritual repetition preserves the enclosed purity of the childhood world against the forces of time and movement . In his mature works, however, the poet discovers in the eternal becoming of the universe the source of life and poetic inspiration. Ritual now serves as the instrument of the lucid mind as the latter seeks to harness and direct the creative but potentially chaotic dynamisms both of the external world and of the human subconscious. In his masterpieces Vents and, especially, Amers, the entire poem becomes a ritual celebration bringing about, through the creative power of language, the union of text, humanity and universe. Madam Ryan's book will appeal particularly to the specialist. It reflects a comprehensive and intelligent mastery of the text of Perse's poems and ofthe critical writings about them. Her analysis transcends the theme ofritualpe/·se to explore the total elaboration of Perse's poetic doctrine as expressed in the works under discussion. She captures with great sensitivity Perse's sense of the sacred in the world around us and his effort to participate by means ofthe word in the latent life-giving forces ofthe cosmos. Her reading ofthe poems is, however, so meticulous that one occasionally feels lost amid the details of interpretation of individual passages. A greater sense of the structure of the poem as a whole would enhance, for example, the analysis of Pluies and Vents. One would also wish that Perse's use of ritual be situated in the larger context of its use in modern French poetry in general. On a more practical level, the text of Professor Ryan's book is marred by a rather large number of printing errors, such as: "égernellement" (p. 85), "la fourdre divine" (p. 139), and "chaque visage de le mer" (p. 147). JAMES P. GILROY* *A Princeton Ph.D., JAMES P. GILROY is Associate Professor of French at the University of Denver. He is the author of The Romantic Manon and Des Grieux and of "Peace and the Pursuit of Happniess in the French Utopian Novel," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLXXVI. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ...

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