becomes a way of recording and preserving in writing the traces still remaining of the Haitian
landscape. The interest in physical description of natural elements in the verse of poetry can
partly be understood by reading a poem like “Le sans-cesse,” which describes a local flower:
Comme la fleur jolie,
Notre amour pur, Julie,
Fleurit;
Mais ce siècle de prose
Voit la fleur blanche et rose
Et rit. (19-24)Most dictionary definitions of prose include mentioning that which is not poetic. Poetryitself is associated with harmony, lyricism, and beauty. The time in which Durand was writing
was certainly not poetic, given the conflict and instability which characterized the period.
Several of the European texts mentioned in the introduction, by Gobineau, Spencer Saint-John
and others, portrayed Haiti as anything but poetic, relating instead what was sensationalized as
the savage violence of the Haitian Revolution, the mental deficiencies of a brutish population,
and the repeated failures at self-government. Haiti had been associated with these slanderous
negatives and not with the idea of a tropical paradise used to describe other locales traveled to by
Europeans in the nineteenth century. Depicting the beauties of the Haitian countryside allows
Haitian poetry to be written in the traditional sense and works to portray Haiti as a poetic entity.
One of the goals of Parnassian poets was to be faithful to the “art pour l’art” theory which had
preceded and inspired Parnassianism. It advocated that literature should be independent of and
not subservient to political and social concerns. Therefore, a Parnassian influence in Haitian
poetry rests partly with the emphasis given to physical descriptions of natural elements. It is
through nature that Haiti becomes autonomous and separate from the political, social, and
economic problems of late nineteenth-century Haiti. It is also independent of European
representations of Haitian reality. Within Haiti, the Haitian landscape is shared by all, and no