Poetry and Bondage
A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint

Offering a new theory of poetic constraint, this book analyses contributions of bound people to the history of the lyric.

Andrea Brady (Author)

9781108845724, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 October 2021

400 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.81 kg

'This is such a superb and invigorating collection, breaking ground to discover the ?gure of our dream of lyrics song in all its lavish beauty, primitivist rhetoric and longing for ancient home in the language of the Is eye seeing itself to abstraction.' Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold

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.

Introduction: The Fetters of Verse
Part I. Lyric Cells: 1. The Music of Fetters: Thomas Wyatt and the Beginnings of English Carceral Lyric
2. The Ligature: Rob Halpern's Common Place and the Limits of Desire
3. Each in Their Separate Hell: Solitary Confinement in the Long Nineteenth Century
4. Hours of Lead: The Modern US Prison, Segregation and Solidarity
Part II. The Songs of Slavery: 3. Bind Me – I Still Can Sing: Emily Dickinson at the Boundaries of Lyric
4. The Story that Cannot Be Told: M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!, from Form to Performance
5. The Sound Came from Everywhere and Nowhere: African-American Song as Lyric Work
6. Singing at the Window: New Criticism and the Evolution of Lyric
Part III. Pleasures and Ornaments: 9. A New Made Wound: Sadomasochistic Triumphs and Missing Feet in Ovid's Elegies
10. The Ecstatic Lash of the Poetic Line: Swinburne, Hopkins, and the Pleasures of Bondage
11. Soft Architecture: Lisa Robertson and Bondage as Ornament
12. Silken Fetters: Phillis Wheatley and Ornament as Bondage.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Poetry [DC], Literature & literary studies [D]