[April is National Poetry Month, and
to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all
be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add
yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]
I wrote about Harper’s
inspiring, impressively multi-layered life and career in
this post. So here, more specifically, are three of the many Harper poems
we should all read:
1)
“Bury Me in a Free Land”
(1858): Much of the best abolitionist literature was published in nonfiction
genres (memoirs,
speeches,
whatever-we’d-call-David
Walker’s Appeal), but Harper’s poem is one of many she wrote before the
Civil War that stand among the very best abolitionist works. What’s
particularly striking about “Bury” is how it moves between a deeply personal “I”
and a potently collective depiction of the experience of slavery, and does so
without blurring the two identities (crucial for a poet who was not herself
enslaved) while at the same time making clear the interconnections between them.
That relationship, between individuals and the slave system, was a fraught and
crucial one for any and all antebellum Americans, and Harper’s poem depicts it as
successfully and meaningfully as any text I know.
2)
“Learning
to Read” (1872): In many of Harper’s antebellum poems the speaker was not
Harper but Aunt Chloe,
an enslaved woman whose perspective, experiences, and communities Harper
created across a number of works. She carried Chloe forward into many of her
post-war poems, and the Reconstruction-era “Learning” is a particularly
beautiful and significant example. Once again she balances the collective and
the individual, the public and the personal, this time through the historical
conflicts between Northern educators and Southern Confederates over the
literacy (and fate) of former slaves like Chloe. In this case she moves through
the collective toward the poem’s pitch-perfect, intimate final three stanzas,
and their beautiful images of the newly literate, “independent” Chloe in “a
place to call my own.”
3)
“Songs
for the People” (1895): As writers often do, toward the end of her career
and life (she was 70 when “Songs” was published,” although she lived, wrote, and
worked for another 16 years) Harper began to reflect more fully on what she had
done and why she had sought to do it. “Songs” is an interesting such reflection
because, compared to most of Harper’s works including the other two poems in
this post, it contains no explicit reference to African American histories and
communities; a reader unfamiliar with Harper’s identity and body of work could locate
the poem in any community, any nation, in any period. That is clearly part of
her point, as her works and career, and the goals for them she communicates in
this poem, were indeed significant and universal beyond any such contexts. Yet
at the same time, the specific context of the 1890s—of, for example, the depths
of the lynching epidemic—adds another layer of power and meaning to the
final stanza’s “Music to soothe all its sorrow,/Til war and crime shall cease.”
Next poet
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other poets you’d highlight?
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