Saint John Perse and the Aesthetics of the Hybrid

St. John Perse's entire creative output implicitly traces an unprecedented aesthetic evolution through a continuous process of to-ing and fro-ing between different literary registers. At the start of his career, he was lyrical; later, he became epic, before pouring himself, once and for all, into a modernity that values synthesis and abandons rupture. In fact, it drew on all trends, forms and backgrounds to keep up with the times: it mixed all aesthetics (Romantic, Symbolist, Surrealist...) and all nomenclatures (biological, zoological, botanical...) to testify to its artistic and philosophical maturity, in a cratylism that reinforced hermeticism, giving rise to limitless aesthetic hybridization. This hybridization destroyed the partitions between literary movements and abolished the frontiers between the Ages and Languages of Humanity.