Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

Chapter 9 is about eroticism and seduction. Ovid’s Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) is a sophisticated, although today not quite politically correct, guide to romance, love, and lovemaking, in which Ovid presents himself as teacher of love. The Art of Love is of elementary (and elemental) interest to the cinema, a medium that rarely if ever neglects the appeal of love and romance. Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, a major but also controversial figure of European art cinema, made an idiosyncratic feature film of The Art of Love and, for the first and only time so far, put Ovid himself on the screen as protagonist. Consideration of this film includes analyses of on-screen nudity and sexuality: eroticism vs. pornography. Next, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut comes in for extensive critical discussion, for in an early sequence an Old-World seducer puts the moves on a pretty American wife by explicitly referring to Ovid. He reveals himself, however, as an incompetent reader who gets nowhere. By contrast, another film by Max Ophüls, La ronde, comes closest in spirit to the wit, elegance, and sophistication of Ovidian eroticism. The Roman master at the game of love here finds his most congenial descendant. Brief considerations of several thematically related other films end this chapter.