Abstract
Since the advent of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, the fine line between “primitive” and “literary” poetry has become increasingly blurred. William Wordsworth’s “1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is probably the most frequently cited touchstone for modern conceptions of the lyric poem. In describing the goal of his revolutionary collection, Wordsworth felt it necessary to explain in the “Preface”: “It was published as an experiment, which I hoped might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavor to impart.”1 “The real language of men” is a phrase whose implications have been argued for more than two hundred years. At the very least, lyric poetry is now widely accepted as conveying the voices of particular individuals, speaking in their own dictions (or dramatizing those of characters), addressing their own communities, and selecting from a wide range of “acceptable” forms or prosodic features employed either conventionally or innovatively. Since the time of Wordsworth, readers have tended to expect poetry to preserve the vivid animation of speech-in-conversation versus elevated diction, Latinate, and archaic phrases and to represent a personal utterance rather than an expression of the state or praise to a patron or nation.
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Notes
Wordsworth, “1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads” in The Prelude: Selected Poems and Sonnets, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 1.
F. Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I will be building my interpretation of slave songs primarily using Irele’s ideas in chapter 2, “Orality, Literacy, and African Literature,” 23–38, but the book as a whole is a classic critical text that I cannot recommend more enthusiastically.
See Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) for an early and beautifully developed study of how ancient and international “non-poetic” forms account for much of what we consider to be “poetic” in the modern lyric. This book has become something of the scholarly equivalent of a cult classic.
Will Coleman’s Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) serves as a fascinating parallel text to Welsh’s book. Coleman’s interdisciplinary study is an excellent overview and analysis of tale-telling patterns in the African diaspora addressed from the perspective of black theology.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Criticism: Major Statements, eds. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 337.
Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, eds. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xi.
Michael Palmer, Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 1983), copyright page.
Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia & Oceania (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1969), xx.
John Lovell Jr., “The Social Implications of the Negro Spiritual” in The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States, ed. Bernard Katz (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 129. Originally published in Journal of Negro Education, October 1939.
Cary Nelson, ed., Anthology of Modern American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 491.
Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773–1927 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), iii.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 1 (1990): 97–98.
M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 1. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 286–87.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 32.
W. H. Thomas, Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro and their Economic Interpretation (College Station: The Folk-Lore Society of Texas, 1912), 5.
Roland Hayes, My Songs: Aframerican Religious Folk Songs Arranged and Interpreted by Roland Hayes (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press; Little, Brown, and Co., 1948), 93.
Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1925), 17. The citation is taken from Booker T. Washington’s introduction to Twenty-Four Negro Melodies by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in The Musician’s Library.
Northrop Frye, “Introduction: Lexis and Melos,” in Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays 1956, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), x–xi.
David Lindley Lyric (London: Methuen, 1985), 2.
W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 176–77.
William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1995), 70.
John Lovell Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual was Hammered Out (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 296.
R. Nathaniel Dett, ed., Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro As Sung at Hampton Institute (New York: AMS, 1972), 127.
Theo F. Seward, Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University (Nashville, Tenn.), under the auspices of the American Missionary Association (New York: Biglow & Main, 1872), 8.
John W. Work, American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular (New York: Dover, 1998), 212.
Joseph Addison, “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” Criticism and Aesthetics 1660–1800, ed. Oliver F. Sigworth (San Francisco: Rinehart, 1971),
Robert Pinsky, “Responsibilities of the Poet,” in Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.
Walt Whitman, “Preface” (1855), Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 426.
Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 34.
This poem is found in most major in-print anthologies of African American poetry so it is easily accessible, including in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 1619–20.
Jerry W. Ward Jr., ed., Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (New York: Penguin, 1997), 157.
William Smith, Smith’s Bible Dictionary (Old Tappan, NJ: Spire Books, Fleming H. Revell, 1975), 34.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 160.
Sterling Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 17.
James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, The Books of American Negro Spirituals, bk. 1 (New York: Da Capo, 1925), 11.
Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers: How Black Music Changed America and the World (New York: Amistad, HarperCollins, 2000), 213.
Rev. Gustavus D. Pike, The Singing Campaign for Ten Thousand Pounds: Jubilee Singers in Great Britain, rev. ed. (New York: American Missionary Association, 1875), 14–15.
J. B. T. Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers; with their Songs, 4th ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875), 89.
Hungerford, The Old Plantation and What I Gathered There in an Autumn Month (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 345.
Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 393–94.
D’Jimo Kouyate provides an excellent firsthand description of the griot’s historical role and current relevance: “The griot was the oral historian and educator in any given society.” It was the griot’s “responsibility to make sure that the people received all the information about their ances-tors…. What the griot gave to African society in oral history, cultural information, and ancestral wisdom and knowledge is the key with which all people of African descent can progress and maintain a high level of understanding of their true heritage.” D’Jimo Kouyate, “The Role of the Griot,” in Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African-American Storytelling, eds. Linda Goss and Marian E. Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1989), 179–81.
Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of A Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863), 3.
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© 2008 Lauri Ramey
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Ramey, L. (2008). Slave Songs and the Lyric Poetry Traditions. In: Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610163_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610163_2
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