influence his career as an educator and poet. Durand worked in the tin industry in the years
immediately following high school and entered into the teaching profession in the early 1860s.
In 1867 he became the director of a school in Gonaïves when Delorme was the Minister of
Public and Religious Instruction. Durand later went on to other government posts, eventually
presiding over the Chambre des représentants in 1888. His focus, however, was clearly poetry,
and he published his poems in Haitian journals throughout his lifetime. In addition to Delorme,
the other person of mentionable significance was Durand’s wife, Virginie Sampeur, a fellow poet
and teacher whom Durand met while teaching at the Lycée du Cap Haïtien. Sampeur is known
as the first Haitian poetess and appears to be the only woman poet in Haiti in the nineteenth
century. The couple, who married in 1862, divorced after nearly nine years of marriage, but her
impact on Durand’s poetry is noteworthy and will be discussed in more detail. Durand was
named Haiti’s national poet at least as early as 1879 in the Cap Haitian journal Le Vigilant.^185
He was officially recognized as such by a government subsidy in 1905, just a year before his
death.^186
3.2 FRAMING A POETIC PROJECT
Durand’s Rires et Pleurs, which is divided into two books, was first published by theImprimerie Editions Crété in France in 1896. Although I have not uncovered any specific
(^185) Le Vigilant [Cap Haïtien] le 15 avril 1829.
(^186) Durand continued to author individual poems between 1896 and 1905, many of which I am still finding. For this
purposes of this study, however, I have chosen to focus only on the poems found in the 1896 collection, Rires et
Pleurs.