The National Interest
Spring 2002

A Poet Passes: Leopold Sedar Senghor Remembered

by Ahmedou Ould Abdallah

 

. . . The political and the personal merged in Leopold Senghor in the best of ways. A man who can really see beauty is bound to be humble before it, and so Senghor never built status for or statues to himself, or imposed his picture on his country’s currency bills or postage stamps. At one of our encounters he said: "Birds are much more graceful than presidents on stamps." That made me remember the cranes I saw for the first time in the presidential park forty years ago; and now I cannot help but remember their grace and that of Senghor together. . . .