Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

American literature is not only more than Hawthorne and Poe; it is more than English.

Long before the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets and their white colleagues were writing in Louisiana, in French, with a quality inspired and polished by a sense of poetic community. These were the Creole poets of the 1800s, creators of a body of work that is at last available in an English translation by renowned translator Norman R. Shapiro.

Creole poets have always eluded easy categorization, in...