James Monroe Whitfield, Poetry, and Martin Delany’s Revolutionary Worldmaking in Blake; or, The Huts of America

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Abstract Martin Delany’s Blake, serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62, includes five unattributed poems from James Monroe Whitfield’s volume America and Other Poems, which appear in the novel as compositions of the Cuban revolutionary poet Placido. Largely overlooked in scholarship on Blake, Whitfield/Placido’s poems are crucial to the impending revolt of the oppressed because they foster a collective emancipatory consciousness and model, through poetic form, the meticulous organization on which the revolution relies for success. Resonating with other poems and songs quoted in the novel, they speak to broader questions of poetry’s role in building communities of resistance. In turn, Blake’s emplotment of revolutionary organizing actualizes Whitfield’s poems’ revolutionary idiom, distinguished by orientation toward a liberated future, thematic focus on imminent violence against the oppressor, the affect of outrage that sutures individuals into a volatile collective, and the rhetorical tropes of collectively voiced apostrophe, exclamation, and rhetorical question. While Blake reframes Whitfield’s poems as inspiration for the fictionalized Cuban liberation movement, the printed page of the Weekly Anglo-African with its coverage of the Civil War recasts the poems as calls to arms in the ongoing Black struggle for liberation.