SOURCE: "Negritude and Negation: The Poetry of Tchikaya U'Tamsi," in Books Abroad, Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 511-15.

In the following essay, Knipp examines the themes of negritude and the alienation of the modern African in Tchicaya's poetry.

The Congolese Felix Tchikaya U'Tamsi is the most prolific and gifted of the second generation of francophone poets. He is also the most difficult. His surrealism reaches back through Aimé Césaire to André Breton and others in the 1920s. In this sense he is an old-fashioned poet—even bookish and academic. But his poetry, which in the hands of Gerald Moore, Sangodare Akanji and others seems to translate well, is oblique, fluid, suggestive, and replete with private symbols and symbolic motifs which accumulate meaning as they appear in poem after poem. Moore describes this process as a "spiral, exploratory movement."

It is easy to read U'Tamsi as a poet of...