Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

eventually included in Emile Nau’s 1854 compilation Histoire des caciques, these observations

root poetry in the Caribbean, in the very space Haitians inherited through European oppression.^33

The most detailed insights into the relevance and importance of poetry are provided by Haitian

texts in each of the three chapters. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind the general view

of poetry during the Romantic period in Europe. Once again, Bénichou unequivocally associates

not only Romanticism but Romantic poetry with the ongoing revolutionary overthrow of values.

For Haiti, this would mean, I believe, negating or rebelling against the old and current racist

thoughts which exclude Haitian’s participation in the world sphere and the denial of racial

equality in modern terms. Speaking first of this spiritual power, and then of poetry, Bénichou

completes his argument in this way:

This power was situated in literature, raised to a therefore unknown eminence.

Romantic spiritualism is inclined to invest poetry in particular with this eminence;

in this sense, romanticism is a consecration of the poet. It is not by accident or by

an incidental consequence of its nature; romanticism is in its very essence a

consecration of the poet. The distinctive trait of romanticism about which there

should be the least doubt is surely the exaltation of poetry, now considered to be

the truth, religion, and the illumination of our destiny, and ranked as the highest

value: it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that nothing like this had ever been

thought of before.^34

In Haiti, this same conviction would apply to mulatto and black poets, whose writing

once again meant a powerful participation in modernity and simultaneously contesting the racist

ideologies and practices which tried to exclude Haitians from the global scene. Also, the

Revolution in poetry is central to meaning for Haitian modernity, not only as the event that

(^33) See Emile Nau, Histoire des caciques, Tome I, II (Port-au-Prince: Editions Panorama, 1963).
(^34) Bénichou 189. Italics my emphasis.