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 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.

The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology's ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

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.

"Dickinson's Misery" is our luxury. This rich and rewarding study uncovers intellectual value where no one thought to look for it before: in the envelopes, clippings, pictures, flowers, and dead insects that so often accompanied a Dickinson lyric. A lively, mischievous, and memorable book."--Diana Fuss, Princeton, author of "The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them" and "Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference,"

""Dickinson's Misery" stunningly combines scrupulous historical and theoretical explorations of Dickinson's bizarre poetic practices, and in so doing it opens the most fundamental questions about what critics and readers since Dickinson have come to call the "lyric." Future writing on poetry in nineteenth-century America and on the nature of lyric and lyrical reading will need to address Jackson's searching arguments."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, author of "On Deconstruction"

"Who doubts that Emily Dickinson wrote lyric poems? Yet this turns out to be one of those truisms that dissolves in the face of simple attention. By showing how much we normalize the strange things that Dickinson wrote precisely by reading them as lyrics, Jackson has written a book that earns its subtitle: a theory of lyric reading. This is one of the most inventive and observant books yet written on Dickinson, but it is more than that: I know of no better study of the performative character of reading, nor of any book that does more to open our eyes to just how little we know about the range of genres and styles of reading in the past."--Michael Warner, Rutgers University