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 on key texts of black poetry in French since 1900, and by situating the men who wrote them. In all, twenty-seven poets are represented by approximately 170 poems. These poems, together with the commentaries, offer a broad perspective of the poetry of black self-awareness in French, a body of work still neglected...