Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

in the late nineteenth century than as an anti-colonial writer, all the while maintaining a focus as

national poet. Durand’s defense of Haiti against the Germans is not surprising, and his defense

of France is not radically different from that of the Cuban slaves in the poem “Aux Cubains.”

His status as a Haitian poet enhances the universal import of his poetry which speaks against the

suppression of liberty and foreign oppression even outside the Caribbean. Just as Michael Dash

would argue about Anténor Firmin, Durand also represents “a way of being Haitian that was not

isolationist but enmeshed in the global interconnectedness of the modern world.”^239 His identity,

tied to the radical universalism of Haiti’s revolution and the on-going meaning of its notion of

equality, denotes poetry powerful enough to be able to say in the poem “Jeune Air”: “J’aime

autant la France éternelle.”

I will restate at this juncture that this power as a poet also comes from humility which

constitutes much of his subjectivity. In “Ode à la France,” for example, the subject declares the

need to borrow the pen of other writers:

Que ne suis-je un de ceux que le monde contemple,

Que la postérité

Fait asseoir le front fier, tranquille, dans le temps

De l’immortalité?

Barbier, Rouget de Lisle, oh! prêtez-mois vos ailes,

Votre hardi coursier!

Faites rugir mon luth en strophes immortelles

Sur des cordes d’acier! (5-12)

This stated insufficiency in status is not because the poet is writing about France, as

throughout Durand’s collection the poet refers to his modest talent. The first poem in the

collection to portray the poet in this light is the third poem in the collection, “La Brune

Jardinière,” where he begins by asking Sainte-Beuve to lend him a lyre so that his own poetry

(^239) Michael Dash, “Nineteenth-century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letters from St.
Thomas,” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (2004): 51.