Poèmes

In his introduction to these poems, first published in 1964, Senghor recounts having wanted to “[…] tear them up, finding them still imperfect,” before changing his mind and choosing to include them in the volume, this necessary preface bringing “[…] a breath of youth” to the collection.

A fine copy with fine provenance, dating from a little less than a year after Senghor’s election to the Académie française, of which Maurice Druon would become Permanent Secretary a year later, on November 7, 1985. The former Minister of Cultural Affairs under President Georges Pompidou, a member of the Académie since 1966, had long urged his fellow academicians to elect an African writer to the Académie française. Senghor was the first to be so elected, at the age of 77. He was elected on June 2, 1983, with the ethnologist and politician Jacques Soustelle, representative of French Algeria, elected alongside him: “One cannot imagine two more different men, capable of communing fully at the level of true culture. By bringing them together, the Académie recovers a ‘humanist’ inspiration it had long since lost. It records, in a sense, the reconciliation of Africa and Europe and the healing of old wounds,” observed Le Nouveau journal in its edition of June 4, 1983.