Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

much of Haiti’s consistently stated mission had been to defend Africans from racial prejudice

and practices. Seventy years later, however, and approaching the centennial, the Muse’s

response reads as a plausible assessment if not a judgment of Haiti’s literary and political past.

The muse’s declaration comes with criticism and condemnation: poetry in Haiti has proved

inadequate, and Haiti’s mission of sovereignty for a black nation and rehabilitation of a race an

utter failure. Haitians faced on-going economic devastation, political instability, and

international hostility.

Still aligned with much of the earlier ambitions for Haitian poetry, Coicou’s poem

“Introduction” nonetheless forms much of the premise and the paradox of his entire project.

Defined by a tension between this sense of failure and the will to overcome it, Coicou’s poetry is

about the futility of the poet’s devotion to nation as much as it is about his determination even in

face of devastating obstacles. A long break in the text signals the Muse’s departure, and the

following words, spoken by the poet in solitude, close the poem:

Et me voici seul ... Seul, sans luth, je chanterai

Pour toi, Patrie, objet de mon culte sacré!

Oh! pour la rendre fière, invincible, immortelle,

Dieu pour qui je combats en combattant pour elle,

Pour elle inspire-moi; comme elle, inspire-moi.

Mon luth c’est tout mon cœur ; ma muse, c’est ma foi. (131-136)

Here the poet confirms that the lyre, and by association, lyric poetry, which often

connotes harmony and light-heartedness, is not the best mode of expression given Haiti’s current

crises. Lyrical poetry, too, with its more personal subjects, will give way to political concerns,

expressed through longer narrative verse, epic-like stanzas, and a variety of didactic and satirical

tones. If we explore one more time the analogy of Coicou’s poetry to that of Horace and the

Latin tradition, we find that Horace, too, separates from his muse what are called the “Roman

Odes.” Rayor Batstone explains the political import of this gesture: