Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

radicalism of the 1930s should tempt us to look again at what has been

stereotyped as an inauthentic, mimetic nineteenth century.^19

If Dash’s argument can reframe the study of Firmin’s late nineteenth-century letters from

exile, then criticisms of nineteenth-century Haitian poetry should certainly be challenged within

this same framework. One century of writing, or one genre of writing, does not have to claim

value at the expense of a previous period or other literary mode. If studies prompted by the 2004

bicentennial can demonstrate that Haitians did not merely imitate but ultimately transformed the

universal idea of freedom through their own revolution, then surely the same claims could apply

to the literature which followed. On this point, Nick Nesbitt convincingly demonstrates that as

the greatest political event of the age of Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution was by no means

a passive acquiescence to the Declarations of the Rights of Man, never intended to encompass

the total and sudden abolition of slavery and certainly not the formation of a state lead by black

and mulatto leaders.^20 Similarly, that blacks and mulattos in nineteenth-century Haiti would

author poetry in French, assert poetic subjectivity, and claim their own modern history

constituted radically unexpected gestures in the global environment hostile to Haiti’s

articulations of nationhood. Moreover, Haiti’s Romantic poetry displays the awareness Haitian

writers had about the stakes involved in their own ideas of nation and notably of the fragility of

these ambitions. This dissertation demonstrates that mere imitation thus constitutes an

impossible label to characterize the first century of Haitian literature and with which to approach

the complexities of Haitian poetry. Contrary to previous assessments, I argue that Haitian poetry

(^19) J. Michael Dash, “Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letter From
St. Thomas,” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (2004): 46.
(^20) Nick Nesbitt, “The Idea of 1804,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 17-19. Similar compelling arguments along
these lines are also made by Hilary McD. Beckles in “Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean Modernity,” Callaloo 20.
(1998) 777-789.