Whatever changes [Césaire] has undergone … in developing his poetics and his language, we must never forget that his definition of his goal as a poet and as a politician has never changed to the extent that he has altered his outlook on colonialism. He defined himself as a political poet in 1939 when the Cahier d'un Retour au pays natal appeared in the cultural review, Volonté, he continued to write about colonialism and oppression in the most hermetic of his surrealist poems during the forties, and he is yet a political writer today, having moved to the theater which he finds to be a better forum for the expression of his political ideas. Although certainly poetry has been for him an important vehicle of personal growth and self-revelation, it has also been an important expression of the will and personality of a people. As a political poet, he...