coûta la vie”^321 Coicou’s example opens up the debate about the role of poets in politics in
Haitian society and undeniably illustrates the dangers of putting poetic aspirations into political
practice. For Coicou, the passage from dream to action and from poetry to politics was a natural
if not an inevitable trajectory. “Chez nous,” Coicou wrote in a letter to a friend, “l’homme
littéraire n’est que la préface de l’homme politique.”^322 This last statement makes the study of
his poetry even more paramount. Coicou’s devotion to national literature preceded his own
martyrdom in 1908, and in 1915, American forces began a nineteen-year occupation. This
foreign invasion, Haiti’s first in over one hundred years, was a manifestation of the national
death and culmination of American influence Coicou had feared and expressed in his verses
nearly three decades before. All of these brutal realities signal an end to a certain literary and
historical era in Haiti as Romanticism ends and national confidence all but disappears. In the
most tragic way possible for nineteenth-century Haitian poets, Haitian history had come full
circle, but the commitment to poetry would continue, and the national aspirations and concerns
to which poets had given voice would resurface. The eclecticism of La Ronde which had begun
in Coicou’s lifetime would survive in limited fashion through the early years of the occupation,
before the notions of racial solidarity and consciousness of African identities, already visible in
Coicou’s work, would redefine Haitian literature for the greater part of the twentieth century.
(^321) Marcelin 160-161.
(^322) La Ronde [Port-au-Prince] août 1898: 81.