3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction proposes a new theory of American poetry showing that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of its major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country’s own distinctiveness. On the other hand, American poetry welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions that originate from outside the country. Its influences range far beyond America’s borders. The force of these two competing characteristics drives both individual accomplishment and the broader field. The story moves through historical periods and honors the poets’ artistry by paying close attention to the verse forms, meters, and styles they employ. Its examples range from Anne Bradstreet, writing a century before America’s establishment, to the poets of the Black Lives Matter movement. Individual chapters consider how other major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson emphasize convention or idiosyncrasy and turn to American English as an important artistic resource.

Poetry and Bondage

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.

Conjuring the Ghost: A Call and Response to Haints

This article discusses haunting as a condition and strategy for Black women in their lived and literary experiences. I use the haint as a key figure for understanding Black women's liminal state as both the ones haunted and the thing haunting and focus on one of the haint's primary manifestations: the hag. Throughout the essay I unpack maligning myths of this specter and center the works of Phillis Wheatley and Lucille Clifton to refigure the hag as a spiritual and ancestral presence.

Lost Years Recovered John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton

A cache of Essex County legal papers reveals that when Phillis Wheatley Peters and her husband left Boston in 1780, they moved to Middleton where John became a landowner on a farm where he had been enslaved. I analyze the racial, class, and gender conflicts that led to their eviction.

Religion and the Republic

This chapter attempts to enter into the ongoing debate over Calvinism’s place in the politics of the American Revolution by considering, in the persons of Phillis Wheatley and Lemuel Haynes, the black Calvinist tradition as generative of a distinctive theo-political imagination. Taking as its focus the thematics of providence and liberty, this chapter argues that black Calvinists in the Revolutionary period possessed a more sober, self-critical outlook on divine providence and a more comprehensive, consistent spirit of liberty than many of their Anglo counterparts. Wheatley and Haynes evidenced a critical patriotism and commended an aspirational vision of nation building that had as its hope the full humanity and equality of all people. Their cautionary theo-politics anticipated future national tensions, the implications of which continue to be felt today.