necessarily follow a certain trajectory, moving away from political poetry, but that he chose to
publish the poems in Impressions at a later, and perhaps less urgent time in Paris. Coicou didn’t
publish his early poems from Passions until 1903 as well, and it is relatively certain that they
were authored at a much earlier date.
Coicou left Paris to return to Haiti in 1904. Chief among his accomplishments upon hisreturn was his support of the instruction of Creole in schools in Port-au-Prince, his return to the
Lycée Pétion as a teacher of philosophy, his founding of the short-lived literary journal Œuvre,
and his speech at the funeral of Oswald Durand in 1906. Coicou also taught at the Ecole des
Adultes, a school in Port-au-Prince created for the benefit of illiterate workers. He founded the
Théâtre Haïti where he directed more than 40 plays, although less than ten were known to exist
in manuscript form, and only a handful are accessible in Haiti today. Most notably, Coicou
established the Bibliothèque Amica, named for his mother, a precursor to the eventual
Bibiliothèque Nationale d’Haïti. Haitian professor Prosper Chrisphonte explains Coicou’s
commitment to literature and to literacy in this way:
Son idée profonde était de justifier les légitimes aspirations des noirs en prouvant
qu’ils possèdent une intelligence qui leur est propre et qu’ils ne sont pas
insensibles à toutes les formes de beauté [...] justifier leurs tendances nationales
en améliorant leur culture intellectuelle, et c’est à nos poètes...qu’il entendait
demander les éléments de ce progrès.^301(^301) Prosper Chrisphonte Un écrivain par les textes, seconde partie (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du Séminaire
adventiste, 1954) 101.