... of American lyricization in which Black poets framed it as a raced and gendered imaginary. Indigenous poets did, too, especially by the end of the nineteenth century, as did Spanish American and, later, Asian American poets, but the chapter focuses on the dialectical relation between Black and White poetics...

..., 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—the book demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries...

... of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness. For Black poets in the nineteenth century, such interpellation felt—for good reason—like erasure rather than expression. As Black poets wrote poems that foregrounded...