Poetry and Bondage

A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint

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Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric – and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

• Offers new readings of canonical writers including Thomas Wyatt, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Ovid, Christopher Marlowe, and Phillis Wheatley, alongside contemporary poets
• Analyses the history of lyric from ancient Rome through the present day
• Scrutinises the way that white critics and scholars have interpreted lyric poems, including by Black poets and singers, in ways that reproduce the privileges of whiteness

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