Before Modernism: Inventing the American Lyric

Jackson's Before Modernism is animated by a desire, in the author's telling, to redress the absence of Black poets in accounts of American lyric by accounting for how Black poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced the conditions for the invention of modern American lyric poetry. Lyric is notoriously difficult to define, but the working definition for this book is mostly consistent: “an elevated form of self-expression addressed to everyone at once and to no one in particular,” in which “what is left unsaid is more significant than what is said.” Lyric poetry is characterized by a condition in which the “subjective expression” is the “locus of impossible speech” of an alienated speaker and is the “basis for later emphases on the fiction of ‘the speaker’ as an imaginary person who says what the reader of lyric poetry wants to hear.” Reading lyrically is to “confuse the poem with the person.”The transformative “antagonism” (Jackson draws on Adorno's belief that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of social antagonism”) between Black and white poetries begins, for Jackson, with white appropriation of the “impossible speech” of enslaved poets such as Phillis Wheatley Peters and George Moses Horton, whose poetry's importance lies in “what it reveals or suggests of the slaves who wrote it, and, by extension, what it reveals about the institution of slavery.” In Jackson's telling, white poets appropriated the pathos of this surplus value, and this appropriation “animated the transformation of the neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres in which Wheatley and Horton wrote into modern lyric forms.” This appropriation was done by white abolitionist poets through the literary devices of apostrophe, personification, and animation, as Jackson demonstrates through skilled close readings of the work of John Pierpont as against that of Ann Plato, a free poet of color. Next, Jackson argues that Black poets reframed these forms as white appropriations, through the fugitive poetics of a Black surplus lyricism, such as Frederick Douglass's reprinting of Pierpont's “The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to the North Star” in his antislavery newspaper, The North Star. Particularly skillful is Jackson's reading of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poem “Eva's Farewell” among the fray of “Eva” poems and songs following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jackson is an excellent close reader, and her readings are particularly gripping when she compares Harper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow under the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, which functions “as both a kind of trans-poem and a kind of trans-person.”My argument with this study is that, in figuring American lyricism, as it does, by way of Hegel, Adorno, and Benjamin, Jackson implicitly installs their views as normative, without making an adequate historical case for their having that status—a move especially striking if her goal is to trouble the white transatlantic genealogies that erased eighteenth- and nineteen-century poets hitherto, and poets of color almost wholesale. Jackson's book reflects this dialectical structure: It begins a “dialectical process” by focusing on the work of Black poets in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Next, it focuses on the early nineteenth-century poetics of whiteness, and finally it interlaces the racialization of Black and white poetics in the 1840s and 1850s. To this end, Jackson conducts what she terms “slow readings”—readings centered on who is speaking in a poem and the dramatic situation that these speech acts generate—of works by Wheatley Peters, Horton, Douglass, Plato, Harper, and James Monroe Whitfield.I am uncertain how best to characterize the foundational premise of Jackson's monograph and consider that my uncertainty is less an indication of my own rhetorical indecisiveness and more an expression of an ambiguity at the heart of Before Modernism. I mean the recurrent slippage between the biographical identity of the poet and the I that constitutes the poetic speaker that structures Jackson's analyses of the work of enslaved poets but not that of white poets or of Douglass. This conflation of the biographical poet and the rhetorical poetic voice is notable because Jackson herself recognizes that Wheatley Peters and Horton's writing comprised neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres. And it was white appropriation of these genres that transformed them into modern lyric forms, not anything that Wheatley Peters or Horton or Plato themselves wrote. Puzzling out my unease here made me feel I must have been reading Jackson incorrectly.This approach to Wheatley Peters and Horton stood out to me in stark contrast to that in Jackson's first monograph on the lyric, Dickinson's Misery, which began with the premise that Emily Dickinson's mid-nineteenth-century poetry was not understood as lyric (in the sense that I have defined it here) at the time it was written; Jackson's subject of inquiry, then, was the process of lyrical reading that, she claimed, transforms virtually all poetry we read today into lyrical poetry. I was struck by Jackson's note in the preface to Before Modernism that the book began as an “almost-all-White book about nineteenth-century American poetry in public” and that, as the project shifted “to a book about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Black poets’ interventions in American poetry in public,” she had difficulty “figuring out what poems or people or fake people I was reading.”Jackson's preface seems to perform five disingenuous acts to make the case that today's reader “thinks of lyric poetry as personal expression” and that doing so when reading Wheatley Peters is disappointing because, rather than a person, we find “an airy frame around nothing at all—or at least nothing for which we have a name.” The contortions Jackson must make to read Wheatley Peters's poem as personal (as opposed to commissioned, or as a poem in search of a commission) leave the reader with the impression that writing lyric is so exhausting as to raise the question of the genre's necessity. Jackson's previous work, The Lyric Reader (2014), may offer a clue: When writing about the convergence in lyric of intention and reception, Jackson notes, “we have been better at serving as vehicles for cultural transmission than we are at representing our own views.” Perhaps Jackson's reading of Wheatley Peters in her preface is a vehicle for cultural transmission. Jackson may be performing a contemporary white lyric reading of Wheatley Peters's poem.If so, it is a brilliant performance: an erasure of the various genres of poetry by particular white critics who are most interested in an abstract speaker whom we can make say whatever the reader most wants to hear, especially when, as in this book, the speaker is Black. But if scholarship—and not the poetry or the poets themselves—has taught us to read this way, why not introduce a new model for understanding the poetry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaves, freed slaves, free people of color, based on different terms that are more appropriate to the goals and circumstances of the poems?