the international character of Romanticism as an agent of “compression’ and “expansion” that
would allow for fuller understandings of foreign literary works. Texte, drawing on the work of
A. W. Schelgel, had remarked the extent to which cosmopolitanism was a national characteristic
of the German people during this time. Vital to this effort, then, was practically thinking of ways
to make one’s national literature accessible to an international audience. In the case of Greek
Romanticism, the focus of Jusdanis’ study, this meant massive efforts in translating into Greek
the literatures of other nations and the translating into other languages the Greek poetry of the
Romantic period. Applying these notions to Haiti, one can see how writing in French bypasses
the need for translation, and even if only ideally so, makes Haitian works readable within and
beyond national borders.
My brief discussion of modernity, leading to this understanding of how French languageand literature first entered and then continued to exercise influence in Haiti, is not meant to turn
the focus to the complex theoretical notions of modernity itself but rather to outline a general
framework before proceeding to a study of Haitian Romantic poetry. The statements by Haitian
journalists and other writers, working in tandem with the Haitian poems I consider in the
subsequent three chapters, will fill in this framework to give a more complete picture of the
literary ambitions and ambiguities. Keenly aware that their existence as a nation and their
political ambitions were problematic, Haitians who wrote in the nineteenth century were no less
convinced that their aspirations were noble and their literary output imperative. Literature would
not be immune to the vexed and contradictory aspects of Caribbean modernity, making it an even
more fascinating subject of study.