patriotisme” or “l’épanouissement du romantisme.”^168 Generally accurate in this categorization,
critics nonetheless fall short of providing any in-depth analysis of the individual poets writing
during 1860s, 70s, and 80s.
In this chapter, I will focus on the poetry of Oswald Durand (1840-1906), arguablyHaiti’s most prominent poet in the second half of the nineteenth century. Durand’s poems began
to appear in regional journals decades before his collection of poetry, Rires et Pleurs, was
published in Paris in 1896.^169 Durand’s poem entitled “Dédicace,” which appears at the
beginning of Rires et Pleurs, is dated 1869, indicating that Durand envisioned submitting a
collection of poems early in his writing career. The eventual compilation of poems would be in
two volumes with many of the over 160 texts dated from the 1860s and spanning into the early
1890s. Twentieth-century Haitian writers René Depestre and Jacques Roumain have praised
Oswald Durand’s authentic expressions of Haitian culture and have paid him homage as a
precursor of Haitian indigénisme.^170 In this same vein, discussions of Durand’s poetry
consistently highlight the 1883 poem, “Choucoune,” recognized as the first poem in Haitian
Creole of Haiti’s literary history. It is only one of two Creole poems found in Rires et Pleurs.
Little consideration has been given, however, to the rest of Durand’s collection, the
overwhelming majority of which was written in French. In general, the poems in Rires et Pleurs
illustrate the various reasons Durand was hailed as Haiti’s national poet both during his lifetime
and after his death. Durand’s ambition to give specific expression to social relationships in
(^168) The former is used by Léon-François Hoffmann, in Littérature d’Haïti, a source referenced in the previous
chapter. The later is used by F. Raphaël Berrou and Pradel Pompilus in Histoire de la littérature haïtienne illustrée
par les textes, Tome I.
(^169) Durand.
(^170) As mentioned in the previous chapter, this movement which began in Haiti in the 1920s valorized the traditions,
language, and religion of the Haitian peasantry. One source for Depestre’s mention of Durand can be found in Pour
la révolution, pour la poésie (Montreal: Leméac, 1974) 59. The other by Roumain can be found in La Revue
Indigène (Port-au-Prince, le 3 septembre 1927).