SOURCE: "The Poetry Collections," in Aimé Césaire, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 29-41.

In the following essay, Pallister offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Césaire 's verse.

Les Armes Miraculeuses

In 1944 Aimé Césaire published another collection of poetry, Les Armes miraculeuses, comprised of poems even more hermetic and more revolutionary than Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Bertrand Visage asserts that with this collection Césaire's poetry becomes more complex, the poet now having found in surrealism—and in his friendship with André Breton—a stimulus to take more risks in associating of images.¹ These images, Visage claims, are more hazardous, but they are always sustained by the obsession of the tom-tom, the taste for rhythm, the mixture of verse and prose. The collection is marked, too, he says, by semantic ambiguity.²

The collection's very title showed that the "new negritude" had taken up its arms...