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Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric
How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuries
Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper―as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow―Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people―Black, White, male, female, Indigenous―almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry.
A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric.
Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper―as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow―Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people―Black, White, male, female, Indigenous―almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry.
A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric.
- GenresPoetry
320 pages, Hardcover
Published February 14, 2023
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 11, 2026
3 ‘This book tries to do just that—to give an alternative account of the ways in which early Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken over the past two and a half centuries [...] In the course of the nineteenth century, genres of poems became less important than the genres of the persons represented in and by them.’
9 ‘But what if Wheatley’s and Horton’s poetry was “the main thing”—what if their (and other early Black poets’) importance to the history of transatlantic Anglophone poetics is enormous precisely because the idea that “what is left unsaid is more significant than what is said” is one way of describing the surplus value accorded to all (lyricized) poetry for the past two hundred and fifty years?’
17 ‘And that is because Ann Plato and the poets who preceded and succeeded her in the United States in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries made retroactive ideas of national poetics and Anglophilic Romantic poetics and comparative modern poetics and definitely raced and gendered poetics possible in the first place by inventing the modern poetic genre we now think of as lyric—or, since almost all poetry is now understood as lyric, by inventing the genre we now think of as poetry by inventing the idea that poetry (unlike prose) could be a single genre.’
45 ‘This book is about a version of the racial imaginary that has been difficult to recognize because it is instantiated in the lyric imaginary that has shaped the history and theory of American poetics.’
50 ‘the stories we tell about modern lyric indeed remain remarkably consistent: Once upon a time, before modernism, lyric poetry was the expression of our inner subjectivity, but after x happened, lyric came to be and will every after remain at odds with itself. And so will we.’
137 ‘Phillis Wheatley was not only at the origin of Black American poetics but at the origin of Anglo-American Romanticism.’
9 ‘But what if Wheatley’s and Horton’s poetry was “the main thing”—what if their (and other early Black poets’) importance to the history of transatlantic Anglophone poetics is enormous precisely because the idea that “what is left unsaid is more significant than what is said” is one way of describing the surplus value accorded to all (lyricized) poetry for the past two hundred and fifty years?’
17 ‘And that is because Ann Plato and the poets who preceded and succeeded her in the United States in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries made retroactive ideas of national poetics and Anglophilic Romantic poetics and comparative modern poetics and definitely raced and gendered poetics possible in the first place by inventing the modern poetic genre we now think of as lyric—or, since almost all poetry is now understood as lyric, by inventing the genre we now think of as poetry by inventing the idea that poetry (unlike prose) could be a single genre.’
45 ‘This book is about a version of the racial imaginary that has been difficult to recognize because it is instantiated in the lyric imaginary that has shaped the history and theory of American poetics.’
50 ‘the stories we tell about modern lyric indeed remain remarkably consistent: Once upon a time, before modernism, lyric poetry was the expression of our inner subjectivity, but after x happened, lyric came to be and will every after remain at odds with itself. And so will we.’
137 ‘Phillis Wheatley was not only at the origin of Black American poetics but at the origin of Anglo-American Romanticism.’
Displaying 1 of 1 review