Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Horace, in the dichotomy between Troy and Rome, symbolically alludes to the

same major theme we find in Vergil’s Aeneid (focused on Aeneas’s spiritual

journey from fallen Troy to a new home in Italy): the need of Augustan Rome to

break the curse of civil war in its past century, to become a new nation. Horace

puts most of the preaching into the mouth of his character Juno, who is certainly

fiercer and more truculent than the usual lyrical “I” of the Odes. And so it is no

surprise when, in the final stanza, the Horatian speaker disengages himself form

her tone and from a wayward Muse who, he claims has defied his characteristic

light congeniality.^268

In Coicou’s “Introduction,” it is the opposite: the Muse abandon’s the poet, but the poet

has the last word. If he will sing with out the lyre, with less harmony, confidence, or personal

verve, he implies that his verse will more likely convey discord, pessimism, and collective

lament. The complication, however, in this new direction for poetry, is that the ‘Patrie’ will

become the new lyre, for his heart and his faith. Indeed Coicou’s poetry tends to be less

personal, for example, than Durand’s, but Coicou’s collection nonetheless reveals that personal

emotion is not so easily separable from Haiti’s political situation, and that consequently, the

poet’s subjectivity will come through even in the most political of poems.

These final verses also commission what will follow in the collection. The notion of

combat appears repeatedly in the final stanza of “Introduction” and resurfaces throughout

Poésies nationales, not only in the forms of the word “combat” but also in the homonymic

association of luth/lutte. The oppositions are ones which are now inherent to the poetic project

itself. No longer a battle between which type of poetry should prevail (as in Durand’s corpus),

Haitian poetry will be fraught with the sentiment of failure and with the call to hopeful

resistance. The poet’s decision is finalized, his solitude in this enterprise emphasized along with

his determination. Moreover, the “toi” to whom he speaks is no longer the muse but the country

itself; this shift in allegiance targets the country as new object of religious devotion. This

(^268) Raynor Batstone, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1955) xxv-xxvi.