Author: VIRGINIA JACKSON
“Before Modernism” examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry.
Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, 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—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries.
