Edouard Glissant's literary reputation rests primarily on his novels and essays. There is also strong evidence of his interest in the novel form in his reference to the work of other novelists such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Djuna Barnes and William Faulkner. Nevertheless, Glissant began his career as a poet and continues to produce books of poetry in conjunction with his fictional narratives and theoretical discourses. This sustained refusal on his part to abandon poetry, or even to recognise the conceptual boundary that traditionally exists between poetry and prose, creative and critical writing, is central to the understanding of Glissant's entire literary enterprise. In introducing Glissant in his Anthologie de la littérattire négro-africaine in 1963, Léonard Sainville shrewdly observes:

C'est un poète dans toute I'acception du mot. En devenant romancier, il reste plus que jamais poète.

(He is a poet in the fullest sense of the word. In becoming a novelist, he remains more than ever a poet.)

In this comment Sainville points to a vital and problematic area of Glissant's work and invites us to examine what is meant by ‘a poet in the fullest sense of the word’.

Since Glissant's oeuvre does not evolve in the normal sense – in terms of either theme or genre – his major preoccupations are apparent from his earliest writing and return obsessively throughout the various phases of his work.