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First
Anthology of Poems About Slavery from the 16th to the 18th
Century is Published by Barnard Professor James Basker
Landmark Work in the History and Literature of Slavery
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Barnard
Professor James G. Basker is the editor of a newly published
and landmark anthology of poems on slavery from America
and Britain during the Enlightment – the crucial period
that saw the height of the slave trade, along with the origins
of the antislavery movement.
Published by Yale University Press this month, AMAZING
GRACE: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810
brings together more than 400 poems and excerpts from longer
works by more than 250 poets, both famous and unknown.
The collection charts the emergence of slavery as part of
the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world
and shows the leading role taken by many Christian denominations
in attacking the hypocrisy of "so-called Christians"
for tolerating slavery.
AMAZING GRACE represents a departure in shaping the
canon and literary history, as these poems insistently foreground
the experience of African slaves and their descendents,
whether rendered by black or white writers. The book also
challenges the assumption that slavery is an American issue
of the 1800s; instead, it arose much earlier in the collective
consciousness of the Anglophone world, and involved the
whole of the Atlantic community. In an era believed to have
been accepting of slavery, only 5 percent of the poems are
proslavery; 22 percent are neutral, and 73 percent of the
poems are decidedly antislavery.
Basker, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English, is also
president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
He is a founder of the Gilder Lehrman Center on Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition at Yale and its Frederick Douglass
Prize for the best book of the year on the history of slavery.
He is now at work on a biographical study of Samuel Johnson
as an abolitionist and a personal history of an African
slave who achieved his freedom in eighteenth-century Scotland.
More than 90 percent of the poems in AMAZING GRACE
have never been anthologized before, including a brand-new
translation of Coleridge’s antislavery Greek ode. More
than half of the poems have not been reprinted at all in
200 years, including Boswell’s long-suppressed proslavery
poem "No Abolition of Slavery" (1791), which has
never been reprinted in any form since it was first published
210 years ago.
The book also includes:
- works
by more than 20 African or African-American poets, including
familiar names, mysterious figures, and newly recovered
black poets (Phillis Wheatley, Lucy Terry, Ignatius Sancho,
Benjamin Banneker, Olaudah Equiano, Jupiter Hammon);
- poems
by 40 women, ranging from abolitionists Hannah More to
Frances Seymour, the Countess of Hertford; and
- poems
by such canonical writers as Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Johnson,
Blake, Boswell, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
The
poems speak eloquently of the themes of slavery—capture,
rape and torture, broken families, endurance, rebellion,
thwarted romances, self-sacrifice, and spiritual longing.
They also raise questions about the contradictions between
cultural attitudes and public policy of the time and make
it clear that the plight of Africans and their descendents
was never far from the minds of most during the century
and a half from 1660 to 1810. Writers such as these, suggests
Basker, were not complicit in the imperial project or indifferent
about slavery but actually laid the groundwork for the political
changes that would follow, thus fulfilling Shelley’s
dictum that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world."
Among the poets collected are Francis Hopkinson, a signer
of the Declaration of Independence; Erasmus Darwin, the
grandfather of the great evolutionist Charles Darwin; John
Quincy Adams; John Wesley, founder of the Methodists; and.four
of the Poet Laureates of England (John Dryden, Henry James
Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth).
Contact:
Suzanne Trimel, Barnard Office of Public Affairs, (212)
854-6579, strimel@barnard.edu
Brenda King, Yale University Press, (203) 432-0917, brenda.king@yale.edu
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