be a defining period both personally and professionally. In 1891 he returned to the Lycée Pétion,
this time as a teacher of history and geography for the next several years, and in that same year
he married Lisebonne Joseph for whom he had written many love poems published as Passions
decades later. Lisebonne was the daughter of François Joseph, minister of the Emperor
Soulouque, and the couple had eleven children. It was also this same six year period that Coicou
began to write and became publicly recognized as an important national statesman. His first
collection of published poetry, Poésies Nationales, appeared in 1892. According to Haitian
professor and researcher Pradel Pompilus, Coicou organized a theatrical presentation of his
“poème dramatique” Oracle in 1893, published as a manuscript years later in Paris. He also
produced two plays in verse, Le Fils de Toussaint and Liberté 1896. Anthologies additionally
make mention of three comedies in prose Faute d’Actrice, L’école mutuelle, and L’art pour l’art
performed during this same period, although no traces of them are found today. In 1896, he was
appointed the President of the Association du centenaire de l’indépendance in preparation for the
1904 celebrations and included this organization in his list of dedications in Poésies Nationales.
In 1897, Coicou became the head of the Cabinet Particulier of President Tirésias Simon Sam,
and over the next few years he contributed to various Haitian journals.
Coicou’s Poésies Nationales was clearly the most defining accomplishment of these earlyyears. Published in Haiti and in France, it includes a preface by another Haitian poet and former
director of Haiti’s lycée nationale, Charles Williams. Williams was also one of several
professional and personal contacts to whom Coicou dedicated his collection. William’s seven-
page preface begins with a defense of poetry, a reply to anyone in Haiti who would decry
poetry’s relevance, usefulness or even existence in late nineteenth-century Haiti. Poetry,
Williams contends, is eternal because it is connected to God and is universal because it is a