Criticism: Poetry Of Negritude - Essay

Ellen Conroy Kennedy (essay date 1975)

(Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)

SOURCE: Kennedy, Ellen Conroy. Introduction to The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French, pp. xix-xxix. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1975.

[In the following essay, Kennedy identifies poetry as one of the most significant artistic expressions of Negritude, briefly outlining the rise of the movement and discussing its major poets, including Senghor, Damas, and others.]

Poetry has been the single most important artistic manifestation of the black-world cultural and intellectual movement which, since the close of World War II, has come to be known as “negritude.” This anthology traces its development by gathering, translating, and commenting...

(The entire section is 4286 words.)

Janis L. Pallister (essay date 1991)

(Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)

SOURCE: Pallister, Janis L. “Return.” In Aimé Césaire, pp. 1-28. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

[In the following essay, Pallister analyzes in detail Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal as a work that traces the poet's long journey from a place of alienation from his culture to an eventual acceptance and pride in his cultural background.]

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal—the title alone tells us much. It informs us of the poem's modernity: it says the poem is a “notebook”—certainly not a formal or traditional genre. It speaks of return, after many physical voyages the world over, after many spiritual voyages in which the native...

(The entire section is 12253 words.)