Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Chrisphonte Prosper, a Haitian professor who organized a series of conferences about Coicou’s

life and works in the 1950s, stated that one of Coicou’s primary goals was to justify the

aspirations of Haitians by improving conditions to foster an intellectual culture. For Coicou, as

for other Haitians of his generation, part of this goal would be achieved through the flourishing

of poetry. It is in this way that the ambition of poets like Coicou was not to exclude lower

classes but to develop what they believed to be the transformative power of literature; using high

poetic form was not only integral to Haiti’s claim to legitimacy, but literature became the site

where the low could become the high, the slave a revolutionary, all in an effort to express a more

complete and fully modern Haitian culture.

In the period after the publication of Poésies Nationales, Coicou continued to expand his

literary interests. According to Haitian professor and researcher Pradel Pompilus, Coicou staged

a theatrical presentation of his ‘poème dramatique’ Oracle in 1893, published as a manuscript

years later in Paris, and he produced two plays in verse, Le Fils de Toussaint and Liberté in

1896. Most notably, he helped to found the short-lived journal La Jeune Haïti which preceded

the more well-known journal La Ronde which began in 1898. It was La Ronde which

inaugurated a new era of literature in Haiti for the next century.

As a movement, La Ronde touted eclecticism in literature and the independence of art

from politics. It is sometimes criticized for having denationalized Haitian literature and is

known for its political disinterest and its adherence to the tenets of French symbolism. Coicou

contributed to the journal, and I believe that the appearance of many of his political poems as

well as those of others in La Ronde serve to contest the typical understanding that La Ronde’s

focus excluded committed poetry. Rather, the eclecticism of La Ronde was just that. Overall, it

was much less a reaction against politically inspired poetry than an inclusion and expansion