Poetry in the British Atlantic

Abstract

Poetry in the Atlantic world is a vast subject whose critical study has bourgeoned since around the turn of the millennium, in tandem with the rise of Atlantic Studies as a historiographic paradigm and the emergence of transatlantic scholarship as an important subfield in literary and cultural studies. Theorized as a site of encounters and entanglements between European, African, Caribbean, and North and South American cultures and traditions (both indigenous and imported), the Atlantic has been at the heart of important recent work on key topics such as slavery, colonialism, nationhood, empire, and race. In its cultural heyday during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poetry reflected all of those issues and made their discussion accessible to large and diverse audiences in a range of different media (with verse circulated in manuscript or printed in broadsides, newspapers, journals, and various types of book formats). Although poetry was a major literary genre and public forum, however, in literary-critical accounts of Atlantic culture its importance has long been overshadowed by that of other text types, the novel and nonfictional prose (slave narratives, autobiographies, travel writing) chief among them. Part of this neglect—which recent research is beginning to address—has had to do with the persistence of the nation as an analytical frame of reference (a context in which Atlantic literature fails to align with, say, the English, American, or Caribbean traditions). Another factor has been the ostensible absence of major canonical authors writing poetry that was either produced in the Atlantic world or that explicitly engages with the Atlantic on the level of theme or content. Scholarship on the early Black Atlantic, in particular, has revised this earlier consensus, rediscovering poets such as Phillis Wheatley as major figures working in a historical context irreducible to a single national tradition. Slavery, abolition, and the Black diaspora have, as a result, been major themes in recent discussions of Atlantic poetry. This bibliography mostly focuses on 18th- and 19th-century anglophone verse, given that this body of texts has occasioned most of the important newer scholarship on poetry in the Atlantic world. (Other languages and later periods are included on a selective basis.) The critical discussion of these primary texts has mostly taken the form of historicist readings that foreground the intersections between poetry and various forms of cultural context. Recent contributions to the growing secondary literature on the subject continue in this vein but are also increasingly highlighting formal aspects along with questions of poetics and aesthetics (which includes discussions of the impact of European neoclassical and Romantic styles on poets writing verse in the Atlantic context).