Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

ushered Haiti into the modern world but as the recurring reference for reassessing Haiti’s

ambivalent position of being inside and outside modernity.^35

Relatively recent observations in the study Romantic Poetry can expand the significance

of Romantic poetry outside France and thereby further elucidate poetry’s importance for Haiti in

the nineteenth century.^36 Virgil Nemoinau, in one article of this text entitled “‘National Poets’ in

the Romantic Age” demonstrates that while poetic sacralization began long ago, certainly

already in the Renaissance with Dante and Shakespeare but also in ancient Greece and Rome

with Homer, Hesoid, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the institution of “national poet” comes

sharply into focus toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century:

Why did German-speaking lands need Goethe and Schiller; why did (an absent)

Poland need Mickiewicz; why do Petofi and Eminescu still seem indispensable;

why do even Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes grow so considerably in importance?

[...] What happens in the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century is the

emergence and/or consolidation of the nation-state which feels that it has to

legitimize itself by a number of features that some call institutional, others simply

ideal. Even in cases where nation-states do not yet exist (in fact particularly

under these circumstances), validation of an ethno-linguistic “national” group by

a personal and autonomous literature is seen as indispensable.^37

This quote succinctly summarizes the connection between consolidating the nation-state

in all its ramifications and the flourishing of Romantic poetry. Much of Haiti’s nineteenth

century is too, in fact, consumed with achieving recognition as a nation-state from world powers

and then building the corresponding institutions necessary for sustaining this claim to

(^35) I take this description from the work by Paul Gilroy, who in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness not only signals the ambiguity of the Black Atlantic which the “double consciousness” of its title
aptly implies, but who also puts forth the argument that the Black Atlantic should be considered as “one single,
complex unit of analysis in [their] discussion of the modern world....” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 15. The application of Gilory’s thought as
well as deficiencies when applied to Haiti has been examined by both Sybille Fischer in Modernity Disavowed and
by J. Michael Dash in The Other America.
(^36) Romantic Poetry, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002).
(^37) Virgil Nemoinau, “National Poets in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance,” Romantic Poetry
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002) 249-255.