Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

(Sean Pound) #1

sovereignty. “Even in cases where nation-states do not yet exist” readily applies to Haiti’s on-


going nineteenth-century struggles, making Haiti an ideal illustration of the point of Nemoinau’s


argument. His observations also qualify Haitian ambitions to have national poets as part of a


larger, more global phenomenon which included Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Southern Europe,


Ireland, and Latin America. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to consider the Latin


American traditions of the same period, it is worth mentioning that Romantic poets in various


Latin American countries and colonies who wrote in Spanish have also been viewed as poor


imitators of continental writers.^38 Overall, this contextualization is not meant to reduce Haitian


poetry to merely another instance of Romanticism but to place in it in a proper context of the


period. If one considers the way in which Haiti came into existence, emerging as it did from a


slave colony, it becomes apparent that Haitians use Romanticism for over sixty years of the


nineteenth century to assert equality with other nations while still accounting for national


specificities. If poetry is central to this enterprise, then similarly one could argue that after some


time when the national dream seems to fade as it does in Haiti at the end of the nineteenth


century, then poetry will also wane. Massillon Coicou, for example, after approximately 1892,


turns much more to theater as genre than he does to poetry, and poetry of any national expression


virtually disappears until the later years of the American Occupation, in the late 1920s and


1930s. As this general summary shows, Haiti’s national projects will not always be without


contentions, and the above quotes capture that since nations seek to legitimize themselves


through writing, a certain fragility is already intrinsic to the modern notion of nation itself, with


the Haitian example being even more vulnerable. After all, Benedict Anderson defines nations


(^38) Gwen Kirkpatrick, “Romantic Poetry in Latin America,” Romantic Poetry (Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company, 2002) 249-255. This study also shows that the label of imitation for Latin American poets is
also now being contested.

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