In this dissertation I examine each period and poet as a largely separate project, makingthe general approach to my analyses one eclectic in nature. Each of the three chapters considers
Haitian poetry according to its specific historical context, and therefore different theoretical texts
and secondary sources, some from the nineteenth century, others from present-day American
scholarship, serve to elucidate the texts in question. The individual nature of each chapter means
that some of the same ideas resurface throughout. Repeating key insights is nearly unavoidable
and only reinforces the shared and prominent observations which come through studying the
poets, texts, and other factors in question.
The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on the poetry by two writers of the 1830s,Coriolan Ardouin and Ignace Nau, whose poems about personal loss, pre-national myths and
Haitian revolutionary heroes represent a change from the celebratory and partisan poetry of the
preceding decades. Their poetic texts, along with theories of nationalism and prescriptions for
national poetry articulated in journals of the period, inaugurate the Romantic desire for history
and the liberation of poetic subjectivity which will remain influential throughout Haiti’s
nineteenth century.
I begin this chapter with an historical overview in order to demonstrate that the politicalstability, geographical unity, and French recognition of Haitian independence all allow for new
concepts of nation to flourish during this period. President Jean-Pierre Boyer unified the
disparate parts of Haiti in 1820 and maintained a twenty-rule. Many of Boyer’s actions also
prompt protest in the name of national interests. The recuperation of Dessalines, a former slave
who carried the Haitian Revolution through its final phase, contested the mulatto control and
their exclusive claims to the nation. I then reference two articles occasioned by Haiti’s 2004
bicentennial. In conjunction with the theories on nationalism and literature found in the literary