Durand’s career, do suggest he was initially a poet who wrote extensively about love and nature,
mostly during the 1870s. Only later did Durand devote many more poems to national themes.
Other dates reveal, however, that these broader trends are not absolute and reflect not an
evolution in Durand’s poetry over a thirty year period but rather an expansion of style, content,
and thoughts about poetry. Attempting to date “La voix de la patrie” shows how difficult it is to
establish with certainty a chronology of Durand’s poems. Since this poem is dedicated to
Massillon Coicou, one might conclude that it was written at the earliest in the 1880s when
Coicou began writing poetry. However, two editors of Haitian anthologies specify that this
poem had already made Durand famous during the mid 1870s, but Coicou himself would not
have been more than twelve or thirteen years old at the time of composition.^196 I have not
located any manuscripts of Durand’s texts, but given this information, he likely wrote this poem
early in his career and that later, in a revised form, dedicated the verses to Coicou. If, “La voix
de la patrie” was written in the 1870s, it certainly did not, as its ending might suggest, signal an
abandonment of political poetry. Several of Durand’s most strikingly political poems, such as
“La mort de nos cocotiers” and “Chant national” indisputably date from the 1880s. During this
decade, Durand’s poetry most resembles Coicou’s in terms of style and theme. Rather than a
steady progression, whether in terms of subject matter, tone, or versification, Durand’s work can
best be chronicled as a series of fluctuations at different political, personal, or artistic moments.
Durand’s early period can be considered to include the Romantic poems he wrote in themid to late 1860s. Two poems in particular which do bear specific dates demonstrate that
Durand rather early in his career had a conception of the poet’s role which is consistent with that
of the French Romantic tradition. The first of these is “Ducas Hippolyte.” Durand composed
(^196) Berrou and Pompilus 424-425.