Poetry in the British Atlantic
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 July 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 July 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0391
- LAST REVIEWED: 25 July 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 July 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0391
Introduction
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).
General Overviews
As a literary-critical subject, Atlantic poetry has been approached from a number of different geographical and theorical angles. Shields 1990 and Kaul 2000, for example, focus on 18th-century anglophone poetry by (mostly) white writers (with Shields discussing North American colonial verse and Kaul reading English metropolitan verse about colonial expansion). Giles 2001 is another important study on the 18th-century Anglo-American tradition. By contrast, Paul Gilroy’s influential writing (Gilroy 1993 and Gilroy 1997) draws attention to Black voices and has provided a theoretical basis for much later work on this particular aspect of Atlantic poetry. Fleshing out this approach through recourse to rich historical evidence, Vincent Carretta has done important scholarship to recover early Black writers and their texts: Carretta 2010 offers a chapter-length exploration of early Black authorship, while Carretta and Gould 2001 gathers a series of useful essays on “literature of the early Black Atlantic” (some of which specifically address poetry). Baugh 2001 is helpful as additional reading because of its geographical focus on the Caribbean (and because of a comprehensive literary-historical narrative that extends from the early origins of poetry in the region to the late twentieth century).
Baugh, Edward. “A History of Poetry.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 2, English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions. Edited by A. James Arnold, 227–282. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.
Extensive overview that summarizes the history of Caribbean poetry from its local oral origins via 18th-century colonial verse by British authors to 20th-century postcolonial poetry. Especially strong and detailed on modern and contemporary writers and texts but also worth consulting on earlier traditions. Baugh’s focus on the Caribbean allows him to write about texts not usually covered in similar surveys which are framed as either (Black) British or (early) American.
Carretta, Vincent. “Back to the Future: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Black Authors.” In A Companion to African American Literature. Edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett, 11–24. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Concise overview chapter from one of the major scholars of early Black Atlantic writing. Carretta usefully troubles notions of “British” and “African American” literary nationality through reference to the broader transnational context of the 18th-century Atlantic. The chapter discusses authorship and publishing as key contexts through which Black voices became heard and perceived in the period.
Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
Foundational collection of critical essays on Black writers and writing in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The main focus of the individual contributions is on prose (with chapters on Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Briton Hammon, and Mary Prince), but there are also instructive discussions of the verse of Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon (by Frank Shuffelton and Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy, respectively).
Giles, Paul. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Pioneering contribution to the field of Anglo-American literary studies. Giles argues that English and American literature were reciprocally defined as recognizable individual traditions as the result of a transatlantic dialogue during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Opens with two strong chapters on echoes of British neoclassicism in early American poetry (mainly focusing on Mather Byles and John Trumbull).
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Highly influential monograph that helped to define Atlantic literary and cultural studies as a field. Although Gilroy here is not writing about 18th- and 19th-century poetry per se, this is indispensable theoretical reading that has informed many subsequent critical discussions of poetry in the Atlantic world. Can usefully be read alongside Gilroy 1997.
Gilroy, Paul. “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity.” In Identity and Difference. Edited by Kathryn Woodward, 299–346. London: SAGE, 1997.
Offers, among other things, a discussion of early Black Atlantic writers (including the poet Wheatley) and features themes not covered in Gilroy 1993.
Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Highlights nationalism and imperialism as major concerns in classic 17th- and 18th-century English poetry, mostly through discussions of (canonical) figures such as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, William Cowper, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Charts how British verse of the period mirrors colonial (political and economic) expansion overseas. Includes an important final chapter on antislavery poetry (pp. 230–268).
Shields, David S. Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226752990.001.0001
Rich study that situates 18th-century North American poetry and its political and economic entanglements in the context of British colonial activity in the region (the present-day United States, Canada, and the West Indies). Recovers many largely forgotten texts.
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Article
- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Asia and the Americas and the Iberian Empires
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Berbice in the Atlantic World
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Bolívar, Simón
- Borderlands
- Bourbon Reforms in the Spanish Atlantic, The
- Brazil
- Brazil and Africa
- Brazilian Independence
- Britain and Empire, 1685-1730
- British Atlantic Architectures
- British Atlantic World
- Buenos Aires in the Atlantic World
- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
- Captivity
- Captivity in Africa
- Captivity in North America
- Caribbean, The
- Cartier, Jacques
- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central American Independence
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
- Colonization of English America
- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cortes of Cádiz
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
- Creolization
- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern Amazonia
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European Enslavement of Indigenous People in the Americas
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
- Fiscal-Military State
- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- Founding Myths of the Americas
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
- Free Ports in the Atlantic World
- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
- French Atlantic World
- French Emancipation
- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
- Gender in Iberian America
- Gender in North America
- Gender in the Atlantic World
- Gender in the Caribbean
- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- German Influences in America
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
- Glasgow
- Glorious Revolution
- Godparents and Godparenting
- Great Awakening
- Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World
- Guianas, The
- Haitian Revolution, The
- Hanoverian Britain
- Havana in the Atlantic World
- Hinterlands of the Atlantic World
- Histories and Historiographies of the Atlantic World
- Honor
- Huguenots
- Hunger and Food Shortages
- Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800
- Iberian Empires, 1600-1800
- Iberian Inquisitions
- Idea of Atlantic History, The
- Impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, The
- Indentured Servitude
- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
- Indigenous Knowledge
- Indigo in the Atlantic World
- Insurance
- Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas
- Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World
- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
- Islam and the Atlantic World
- Itinerant Traders, Peddlers, and Hawkers
- Jamaica in the Atlantic World
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
- Jews and Blacks
- Labor Systems
- Land and Propert in the Atlantic World
- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
- Latin American Independence
- Law and Slavery
- Legal Culture
- Leisure in the British Atlantic World
- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
- Literature and Culture
- Literature of the British Caribbean
- Literature, Slavery and Colonization
- Liverpool in The Atlantic World 1500-1833
- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Maritime Literature
- Markets in the Atlantic World
- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Maryland
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
- Mental Disorder in the Atlantic World
- Mercantilism
- Merchants in the Atlantic World
- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
- Mexico
- Migrations and Diasporas
- Minas Gerais
- Miners
- Mining, Gold, and Silver
- Missionaries
- Missionaries, Native American
- Money and Banking in the Atlantic Economy
- Monroe, James
- Moravians
- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
- New England in the Atlantic World
- New France and Louisiana
- New York City
- News
- Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
- Nineteenth-Century France
- Nobility and Gentry in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
- Pacific, The
- Paine, Thomas
- Papacy and the Atlantic World
- Paris
- People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe
- Peru
- Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World
- Philadelphia
- Philanthropy
- Phillis Wheatley
- Piracy
- Plantations in the Atlantic World
- Plants
- Poetry in the British Atlantic
- Political Participation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic...
- Polygamy and Bigamy
- Port Cities, British
- Port Cities, British American
- Port Cities, French
- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
- Ports, African
- Portugal and Brazile in the Age of Revolutions
- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
- Potosi
- Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic
- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Print Culture in the British Atlantic
- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
- Puritanism
- Quakers
- Quebec and the Atlantic World, 1760–1867
- Quilombos
- Race and Racism
- Race, The Idea of
- Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
- Representations of Slavery
- Republicanism
- Rice in the Atlantic World
- Rio de Janeiro
- Rum
- Rumor
- Russia and North America
- Sailors
- Saint Domingue
- Saint-Louis, Senegal
- Salvador da Bahia
- Scandinavian Chartered Companies
- Science and Technology (in Literature of the Atlantic Worl...
- Science, History of
- Scotland and the Atlantic World
- Sea Creatures in the Atlantic World
- Second-Hand Trade
- Settlement and Region in British America, 1607-1763
- Seven Years' War, The
- Seville
- Sex and Sexuality in the Atlantic World
- Shakers
- Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
- Ships and Shipping
- Signares
- Silk
- Slave Codes
- Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic
- Slave Owners In The British Atlantic
- Slave Rebellions
- Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World
- Slave Trade and Natural Science, The
- Slave Trade, The Atlantic
- Slavery and Empire
- Slavery and Fear
- Slavery and Gender
- Slavery and the Family
- Slavery, Atlantic
- Slavery, Health, and Medicine
- Slavery in Africa
- Slavery in Brazil
- Slavery in British America
- Slavery in British and American Literature
- Slavery in Danish America
- Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies
- Slavery in New England
- Slavery in North America, The Growth and Decline of
- Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa
- Slavery in the French Atlantic World
- Slavery, Native American
- Slavery, Public Memory and Heritage of
- Slavery, The Origins of
- Slavery, Urban
- Smuggling
- São Paulo
- Sociability in the British Atlantic
- Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...
- Soldiers
- South Atlantic
- South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos
- South Carolina
- Sovereignty and the Law
- Spain, Early Modern
- Spanish America After Independence, 1825-1900
- Spanish American Port Cities
- Spanish Atlantic World
- Spanish Colonization to 1650
- Subjecthood in the Atlantic World
- Sugar in the Atlantic World
- Swedish Atlantic World, The
- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
- Textiles in the Atlantic World
- Texts, Printing, and the Book
- The American West
- The Danish Atlantic World
- The French Lesser Antilles
- The Fur Trade
- The Spanish Caribbean
- Theater
- Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World
- Tobacco
- Toleration in the Atlantic World
- Transatlantic Political Economy
- Travel Writing (in the Atlantic World)
- Tudor and Stuart Britain in the Wider World, 1485-1685
- Universities
- USA and Empire in the 19th Century
- Venezuela and the Atlantic World
- Violence
- Visual Art and Representation
- War and Trade
- War of 1812
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Warfare
- Warfare in Spanish America
- Warfare in 17th-Century North America
- Warfare, Medicine, and Disease in the Atlantic World
- Weavers
- West Indian Economic Decline
- Whitefield, George
- Whiteness in the Atlantic World
- William Blackstone
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
- William Wilberforce
- Wine
- Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
- Women and the Law
- Women Prophets