Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82

Aimé Césaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years." He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure. Césaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s.
This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Césaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Frantz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Césaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria...