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 deciding to include them in the volume, this necessary preface bringing “[…] something of the breath of youth” to the collection.

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