This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and
freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we
write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history.
The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a
powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it
challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and
aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study.
This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and
freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we
write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that
speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority,
intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught
years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can
and must matter today.
Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by
historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies,
African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists
of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of
writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning,
Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded -
Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf
Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work
has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells
Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.
