Léopold Sédar Senghor
Quick answer: Learn craft from Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet-president of Senegal: the long musical line, praise address and poems scored for African instruments.
Only one great poet has also run a country for twenty years. Léopold Sédar Senghor, born in Joal on the Senegalese coast in 1906, co-founded the négritude movement in 1930s Paris with Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, became the first African agrégé of the French university system, survived Nazi prison camps as a French soldier, and served as Senegal's first president from 1960 until his voluntary retirement in 1980.
In 1983 he became the first African elected to the Académie française. Yet his durable achievement is a body of poems that graft the praise-song, rhythm and imagery of Serer oral tradition onto the French language, long chanting lines that he annotated with the African instruments meant to accompany them.
The grammarian of négritude
Senghor's first collection, Chants d'ombre (1945), gathered poems of exile and memory written in Paris, including his celebrated praise poem to a Black woman's beauty and his homesick evocations of Joal. Hosties noires (1948) mourned the African soldiers, the tirailleurs sénégalais, who died for France and were forgotten by it.
He theorised as he wrote: négritude, in his version, affirmed the values of African civilisation, rhythm, warmth, communal feeling, as a contribution to a universal humanism. Critics have argued with the theory ever since. The poems, especially Éthiopiques (1956) and Nocturnes (1961), outlast the arguments.
Signature moves
Senghor's craft is unusually consistent, and each device can be practised.
What you can learn from him
Write a poem that names its instrument. Decide what your poem is scored for, a single guitar, rain on a tin roof, a train, and let that sound dictate line length and repetition. The constraint is imaginary but its effects are audible.
Practise the praise poem, one of the oldest forms on earth: choose an ancestor or a place and address it directly through a ladder of epithets, each more specific than the last. And loosen your line: draft a poem whose lines are full breath-length clauses, then read it aloud and let your lungs, not a syllable count, do the lineation.
Where to start reading
Begin with 'Femme noire' and 'Joal' from Chants d'ombre (1945), then 'Prière aux masques' and the war elegies of Hosties noires. Éthiopiques (1956) contains the great sequence for kora and balafon. English readers are served by the collected translations of Melvin Dixon. Pair the poems with a recording of actual kora music and the design becomes obvious.
What poets can take from this
- Let breath, not syllable count, decide where a long line ends.
- Choose an imagined accompanying instrument and obey its rhythm.
- Praise something through a ladder of increasingly specific epithets.
- Build homeland poems from touchable details, not concepts.
- Address ancestors directly; the second person is older than the third.
Try it yourself
Write a praise poem to a grandparent or an ancestral place, in long lines meant to be chanted, with a note under the title naming the instrument that should accompany it.
Questions
What is négritude?
A literary and philosophical movement founded in 1930s Paris by Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, affirming Black identity, history and aesthetics against colonial ideology.
Was Senghor really both a president and a poet?
Yes. He led Senegal from independence in 1960 until 1980, stepping down voluntarily, while publishing major poetry collections, and in 1983 he joined the Académie française.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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