Anabasis by Saint-John Perse
Published 1924 · 67 pages · 48,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Poetry
How hard is Anabasis to read?
Anabasis scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Dense poetic vocabulary with classical allusions.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Long, complex poetic structures.
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Abstract meditation on journey and civilization.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with imagery and allusion.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Meaning emerges through image and rhythm.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- Everything operates symbolically.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Perse writes with epic seriousness.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Poetry suggests rather than resolves.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Ten-canto epic poem structure.
How Anabasis is regarded
Anabasis holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.