Chants d'ombre (1945) – Premier recueil de poésie de Léopold Sédar Senghor

Authors : Leopold Sedar Senghor

Genres : poésie

Original language : français

Editions

  • Éditions du Seuil, 1945 fr
  • Éditions du Seuil fr
    ISBN 9782020016551

Chants d’ombre

Chants d’ombre is the first poetry collection by Léopold Sédar Senghor, published in 1945 by Éditions du Seuil. It already features the poet’s distinctive voice: verses rhythmically inspired by jazz and traditional African chants, a call to the universal, and a return to « la terre qui fut ma mère ».

Composed for some of the poems before the war, the collection weaves praise for the sérère country — women, landscapes, rites — and turns Parisian exile into a sung wound. « Femme nue, femme noire / vêtue de la couleur morte de ton sang qui darde le pourpre vivant », is read there: the text will become one of the most famous poems of négritude.

Senghor often reunites Chants d’ombre with Hosties noires in the same edition (Seuil, ISBN 9782020016551), since the two collections answer each other: Africa loved on one hand, Africa standing and bleeding on the other.

Sources