Landmarks [Amers]

The masterpiece by Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse, *Landscapes*, is being published in Greek in its entirety for the first time. The edition also includes the collection *Birds*, a series of thirteen poems originally written to accompany works by the painter Georges Braque. It also contains his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech. [...] Yet more than a mode of knowledge, poetry is first and foremost a way of life — and indeed a life lived to the full. The poet existed within the cave-dweller, and will exist within the man of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of humanity. From the poetic aspiration, the spiritual aspiration, religions themselves were born, and from poetic grace, the spark of the divine lives eternally in the human flint. When mythologies crumble, it is in poetry that the divine finds refuge; perhaps even its transmission. And in the social sphere and human immediacy, when the Bread-bearers of the ancient procession give way to the Torchbearers, it is poetic imagination that once again ignites the high passion of peoples in their quest for clarity[...]. Excerpt from the Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, 10 December 1960.