In 2018, a student asked Terrance Hayes: ‘to be a poet, do you have to write in traditional poetic forms? Do you have to write in iambic pentameter?’ ‘If you can breakdance, that’s cool,’ Hayes answered. ‘If you can breakdance in a straitjacket, that’s even better.’Footnote ¹ He returned to this image elsewhere:

This book will be full of caged birds and the paradoxical freedoms of constraint. But why does a straitjacket make the dancing ‘even better’?

A partial answer might think through the relationship between Hayes’s formalism and his own history. His mother worked as a prison guard, and he found a route to poetry at university, but for a time, ‘corrections seemed like the easiest option. That or the military.’Footnote ³ He makes ample use of traditional forms like the sonnet, as well as variations of his own invention like the ‘golden shovel’. In 2018, he published two books: a sequence of American Sonnets, and To Float in the Space Between, which responds to the work of the imprisoned writer Etheridge Knight.Footnote ⁴ In another poem, ‘Model Prison Model’, he writes: ‘I feel like this is a good time / to tell you my father, mother and closest cousin / have worked decades as correctional officers.’ The poem addresses the effects of mass incarceration on kin both inside and outside the cell. Nonetheless, the speaker confesses ‘surprise’ ‘when I, a black poet, / was asked to participate in the construction’ of a model prison.Footnote ⁵ Identifying not with the prisoner or guard but with the architect, the speaker resists biographical and racialised readings and offers up the poem itself as a ‘model prison’, a space that contains subjects within its formal artifice.

Hayes’s formal experimentations exemplify the paradoxical freedom of constraint. That principle, and its inverse (that liberating poetry from the constraint of form is key to emancipation), are central poles around which poetry oscillates. And so this book starts with a simple claim: for centuries, poets have compared the experience of writing formally constrained verse to bondage. Bondage can be materialised as fetters, chains, shackles and chemical restraints, as well as less visible techniques of control such as coercion, terror or legal injunctions. It occurs everywhere, but certain sites are defined by it, such as the prison, the plantation and the camp. People and animals can be bound in homes, hospitals, asylums, schools, factories and workplaces, churches, public housing, ghettos, reservations, shelters, juvenile facilities, immigration detention centres, farms and abattoirs. Bondage also includes the more ambivalent example of erotic domination. It is an experience of individuals and collectives, it is sometimes voluntary and more often compulsory, and it occurs in both institutions and ‘private’ spaces.

A representative, though certainly not exhaustive list, of poets’ use of bondage as a metaphor for verse-making would include: Samuel Daniel’s urging that form does not represent a ‘tyrannical bounding of the conceit’, ‘as if art were ordained to afflict nature, and that we could not go but in fetters’, and that ‘if our labours have wrought out a manumission from bondage, and we go at liberty, notwithstanding these ties, we are no longer the slaves of rhyme, but we make it a most excellent instrument to serve us’ (1603); John Donne’s remark that Lady Bedford ‘only hath power to cast the fetters of verse upon my free meditations’ (1609), and his lines – probably from the 1590s – announcing that ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce / For he tames it, that fetters it in verse’; Margaret Cavendish’s observation that ‘A sad, and solemne Verse doth please the Mind, / With Chaines of Passions doth the Spirits bind’ (1653); Milton’s famous wish to deliver poetry from the ‘modern bondage of rhyming’ and restore its ‘ancient liberty’ in blank verse (1668); John Dryden’s warning that the muse, ‘When too much fettered with the rules of art, / May from her stricter bounds and limits part’ (1684); Alexander Pope’s similar judgement that Homer’s ‘measures, instead of being fetters to his sense, were always in readiness to run along with the warmth of his rapture’ (1715); Samuel Johnson’s description of poetic melody as that which ‘shackles attention, and governs passion’ (1751); Horace Walpole’s letter to Voltaire, which argues that ‘a great genius … can still shine, and be himself, whatever fetters are imposed on him’ (1768); William Blake’s assertion that ‘Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!’ (1804); Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that ‘metre and rhyme are a fetter, but also a veil which the poet cast around himself …’ (1819); William Hazlitt’s opinion that ‘we like metaphysics as well as Lord Byron; but not to see them making flowery speeches, nor dancing a measure in the fetters of verse’ (1825); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s desire to write ‘such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint but contrariwise the wildest freedom’ (1839); G. H. Lewes arguing that song gives the true poet ‘free movement in the absurdly called “shackles” of verse. Where ever you discern the “shackles”, you may be sure the mind is a captive’ (1842); Oliver Wendell Holmes depicting his Muse as ‘a suppliant, captive, prostrate, bound, / She kneels imploring at the feet of sound’ (1846); Coventry Patmore’s ‘Essay on English Metrical Law’, which commends the ‘shackles of artistic form’ that must be learned through ‘hard discipline’ (1857); Herbert Spencer’s comparison of the muscular excitements of poetic rhythm to a tail-wagging, jumping and wriggling dog ‘chained to his kennel’ (also 1857); the essay on Symbolism by Jean Moréas, which claims Verlaine ‘broke his honour against the cruel fetters of verse’ (1886); T. S. Eliot’s essay on ‘Vers Libre’, which contends that ‘freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation’ (1917); D. H. Lawrence’s admiration for Whitman’s free verse as ‘a wind that is forever in passage, and unchainable’ (1919); Paul Valéry’s admission that ‘Whether I chain myself to the page I wish to write or to the page I wish to understand, in either case I am entering upon a phase of reduced freedom’ (1937); Édouard Glissant’s assertion that ‘Measure … is choice, by which the being puts an end to his liberty in the world and offers to share in it’ (1969); John Agard’s poem ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’, which rejects the charge that his linguistic activity is ‘mugging’ or ‘assault / on de Oxford dictionary’: ‘I ent serving no jail sentence / I slashing suffix in self-defence’ (1985); Susan Howe’s explanation that ‘a lot of my work is about breaking free: starting free and being captured and breaking free again and being captured again’ (1990); John Hollander celebrating the writer who reunites disparate sensations in metaphor ‘and binds them with an indestructible chain of words’, or who ‘can fetter randomness and bind possibility and link design to execution in chains of its own forging which, when worked through rather than slipped off, become garlands of its own achievement’ (1998); Fred Moten’s declaration of interest ‘in the relation between the prison cell and the sonnet’ (2015); and DaMaris Hill’s use of ‘formal verse’ as ‘symbolic of the women’s physical confinement’ in A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing (2019).

In some of these examples, prosody constrains the poet’s imagination; in others, it is the poet who imposes the chains of prosody on emotions or ideas that threaten to escape. For many of these poets, submitting voluntarily to the heteronomy of verse is perhaps the only encounter with bondage they ever have. But even that does not entail any real loss of autonomy: as Philip Sidney wrote, the poet, ‘disdaining to be tied to any such subjection’, is ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention’, escaping aesthetic or political law and freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.Footnote ⁶ For others, the vigour of personal invention can never be enough to escape the gravity of historical and personal bondage.

This leads me to the central question of this book. What would happen to our understanding of the history and practice of lyric if we confronted these claims about constraint with poetic witnesses to actual bondage? How does the poet’s freedom and individuation look from the perspective of slavery or the prison? If as Fred Moten argues, ‘freedom is in unfreedom as the trace of the resistance that constitutes constraint’,Footnote ⁷ how can attending to actual bondage and resistance help us to track a different history of lyric poetry, one that does not map its liberation from formal constraints on to the emancipation of the individual under liberal democracy?

Poetry and Bondage examines how the figure of bondage is put to work by (mostly white) poets and critics in the elucidation of creative freedom. But I will also seek to understand what the bound poet knows, and contributes to knowledge, of freedom as concept and lived or forbidden reality. In doing so, I am drawing on numerous scholars who have argued that Enlightenment philosophies of liberty were composed not just in avoidance of national complicities in the slave regimes around the world, but positively through those regimes.Footnote ⁸ In what follows I briefly discuss the alignment between political and formal constraint, form and body, theme and soul, and the promise that the fetters of corporeality and delusion could be unlocked through the philosophical imagination. My aim here is to establish the historical and theoretical coordinates of the close readings that follow, which will entail some fairly rapid manoeuvres over the field of lyric studies. I want not just to outline my position in relation to some dominant academic orientations, but to establish a set of claims that the rest of this book will elaborate, about the reproduction of whiteness in lyric and criticism.

The Naked Foot of Poesy

The use of the word ‘fetter’ to describe the confinements of verse is conventional, and suggested by the fact that a foot is a unit of prosody. The Old English word feotor emerges around 800, to refer to chains or shackles used on the feet of humans and animals. It is derived from the old Aryan root for ‘foot’; in Latin it was the pedica, in Greek πέδη. The foot was regarded as one of the meanest parts of the body, farthest from the rational activity of the head. The Greek word for slave was andrapodon, ‘man-footed creature’, a coinage derived from tetrapodon, ‘four-footed creature’ – the common name for cattle.Footnote ⁹

Matthew Bevis has catalogued the many associations between poetic composition and foot travel in the Romantic period, including William Hazlitt’s observation that Coleridge ‘liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, … whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk’; Byron’s ‘perpetual consciousness of his lameness’ was also perceived in the irregularities of his metre.Footnote ¹⁰ Dorothy Wordsworth recorded that in wet weather, William went into the garden with an umbrella, and walked back and forth, ‘fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls’.Footnote ¹¹ John Ruskin, explaining prosody to schoolchildren in 1880, described the spondee as keeping the ‘perfect pace of a reasonable two-legged animal’, and poetry by extension having ‘correspondence with the deliberate pace of Man, and expression of his noblest animal character in erect and thoughtful motion: all the rhythmic art of poetry having thus primary regard to the great human noblesse of walking on feet.’Footnote ¹² Paul Valéry offered a syllogism: walking is to dancing as prose is to poetry.Footnote ¹³ And then there’s Frank O’Hara, track star for Mineola Prep, running away from the threatening prosodist.Footnote ¹⁴

The foot keeps rhythm. In chapters 7 and 8, I discuss folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who studied African American song traditions. One of those was Thomas Talley. In his Negro Folk Rhymes (1922), Talley observes that ‘everyone who has listened to a well sung Negro Jubilee Song knows that it is almost impossible to hear one sung and not pat the foot’.Footnote ¹⁵ Talley understands these rhythms to be the remnants of African percussive traditions:

In the familiar account of the relation of oral to written traditions, the melancholy text substitutes for the lost conviviality of song: the hand is a prosthesis for voice.Footnote ¹⁶ In Talley’s analysis, however, the foot is the vestige of a lost drum. This is a different way of thinking of the importance of the foot to poetry, not just with praise of homo erectus or an irritable acknowledgment of the inadequacy of Greek and Latin foot-based prosody to English rhythms, but as the instrument of a non-European heritage of lyric which is embodied, communal and adaptive to conditions of catastrophe and loss. As Talley puts it, ‘the rattle of the crude drum of the Native African was loud by inheritance in the hearts of his early American descendants and its unseen ghost walks in the midst of all their poetry’.Footnote ¹⁷

In writing this book, I have been pursuing these ghosts across the canon and outside it. I’ll give my first example of such a reading. In his sonnet on the sonnet, John Keats fantasises about adorning the ‘naked foot of Poesy’ with more delicate rhymes:

Like Andromeda, the sonnet is ‘chain’d’ by rhyme, a monstrous foreign technology not very suitable to the English language. But not to worry; the sonnet’s ‘pained loveliness’ can still be (somewhat sadistically) enjoyed, once we find her a nicer pair of sandals.

Keats’s argument is rather capricious: if poetry must be sacrificed, at least let the fetters be lovely and the leaves fresh – for example, with this new hybrid Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. Sounds return, but in slightly unpredictable patterns, exhibiting a sprezzatura that beautifies the performance of necessity. But that beautification, the sonnet also argues, is achieved through jealousy, industry and greed, a miserly hoarding of rhyming capital. The lyre, inspected and weighed by a factory manager or critic, is at odds with the delicate sandals with which the poet wishes to adorn poetry’s ‘naked foot’. The poem’s pronomial references are also confusingly ‘interwoven’: there is a communal ‘us’, whose English is bound (though it’s Andromeda, and the sonnet, and the Muse, that are in chains), who are constrained and who must do the work to ‘find out’ better poetic means; but we are also jealous, and ‘may not let the Muse be free’. Our experience of being constrained – who says we ‘may not’? – motivates our constraining of the feminised and fettered figure of Poesy. She is bound because we are. Her bondage is decorated, if not relieved, by the beautification of her chains: she has been persuaded that she is bound in ‘garlands of her own’. The translation of compulsory bondage into a voluntary situation will occupy me throughout this book.

Keats’s sonnet has been read as an exercise in disciplinary, panoptic surveillance, foot fetishism and male sexual violence.Footnote ¹⁹ The sexual energies compressed in Andromeda’s sandal might be related to a story by Strabo: as retold by Havelock Ellis, a sandal belonging to ‘the courtesan Rhodope … was carried off by an eagle and dropped in the King of Egypt’s lap as he was administering justice, so that he could not rest until he had discovered to whom this delicately small sandal belonged, and finally made her his queen’. This anecdote is part of Ellis’s discussion of foot fetishism, where he also notes that Roman prostitutes ‘were obliged to have their feet always naked in sandals or slippers (crepida and solea), which they fastened over the instep with gilt bands. Tibullus delights to describe his mistress’s little foot, compressed by the band that imprisoned it.’Footnote ²⁰ Ovid, as we’ll see in Chapter 9, fixated likewise on the naked foot of Corinna, while those tender feet appear in a rather different way in the reading of Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ in Chapter 1.

But there is another frame that for me vies with psychosexual readings of this sonnet. It was written in Keats’s annus mirabilis, 1819. As such, it is often read as an exercise in formal experimentation, which allowed him to discover the complex sound patternings he used to such great effect in his odes. That is how he presented it in a letter to his brother George.Footnote ²¹ The year 1819 was also that of debates leading up to the Missouri Compromise. George Keats had at that time just arrived in Louisville, Kentucky. George would become a successful entrepreneur, and – after his brother’s death – an enslaver. Three enslaved people would be sold from his estate when he died.Footnote ²² Louisville is on the banks of the Ohio River, the frontier between slavery and freedom. Both George and John were liberals who opposed slavery in principle, though George evidently found his principles were elastic when necessary.Footnote ²³ In this poem, Keats uses a classical myth to depict an enchained woman whom ‘we may not let … be free’, even if we persuade ourselves that the garlands that constrain her are ‘her own’: she somehow wills her own captivity. Read in the context of chattel slavery with which his brother was becoming personally acquainted, this language of inspecting, weighing, desiring and fettering a body which expediency prevents us from emancipating takes on a set of uglier meanings than a relatively simple conceit about the constraints of the sonnet.

J. S. Mill and the ‘Liberal Lyric’

Another influential definition of lyric that draws on a figure of bondage can be found in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay ‘What is Poetry?’ The essay reflects Mill’s discovery of poetry as a space for liberated feeling after a period of intense crisis. In his autobiography, Mill describes his idiosyncratic education, directed by his formidable father John Mill, as solitary and isolated.Footnote ²⁴ His father ‘resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves’ (53). John raised the young Mill to be ‘a mere reasoning machine’ (111). But in the autumn of 1826, Mill famously experienced a profound crisis of belief in his intellectual projects and was overwhelmed by despair. His recovery followed an attempt to cultivate his inner self through poetry, music and art. Reading Wordsworth’s poems for the first time in the autumn of 1828 was ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, because ‘they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty’ (151). Mill also visited Wordsworth in 1831 and was impressed by the poet’s insights into ‘real life and the active pursuits of men’.Footnote ²⁵ That year, Mill also met Harriet Taylor, whom he would marry after the death of her husband. Their friendship opened up a point of access to feeling and to poetry that had been sealed off by his paternal education. In very moving passages written after her death, Mill acknowledges the enormous benefits to him of Taylor’s ‘meditative and poetic nature’ (193) and her intellectual gifts. Through his love for Taylor, Mill’s awakening sensitivities were channelled into poetry as the site of the beautiful and the sublime. Poetry taught him to feel.

It was in this context that Mill wrote his essay ‘What is Poetry?’, which was published in W. J. Fox’s liberal Monthly Repository in 1833. In this essay, poetry is described as a space where ‘the feeling speaks and … impresses itself, and finds response in other hearts.’ The poetic imagination is ‘indebted to some dominant feeling, not … to a dominant thought’.Footnote ²⁶ And those thoughts are spoken in solitude. For Mill, ‘All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy’; it is the expression of ‘the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener’.Footnote ²⁷ While Wordsworth had famously argued that a poet is ‘a man speaking to men’,Footnote ²⁸ for Mill, he is a man overheard speaking to himself: ‘feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude’ (348). Whereas a confession is activated by the address to a listener – the interrogator, priest or God – the poet’s truthful confession is guaranteed by his or her conviction that he or she is speaking in total solitude.

And yet, if the poem is written for publication, then surely the pretence of solitude is undermined at once? Isn’t the poet who pretends to be alone even more of a liar than one who addresses his audience directly? Mill answers that poetry is only poetry when it can retain the authentic quality of private utterance, even when ‘printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop’. The poem is a soliloquy, and ‘no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself’ (349).

Poetry’s truthful communication of feeling is distinguished from eloquence by the absent presence of the audience. In Mill’s influential formulation, ‘eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard’. Eloquence is a deliberative utterance addressed to an audience. Lyric is quarantined from sociability. Anne Janowitz has argued that Mill severs the social setting from poetic intentions and renders explicit the links between the making of liberalism and the making of poetry; he is an important contributor to the tendency, from Romantic poetry forwards, to argue that ‘modern lyric as poetry of inwardness and individuation is built on the ruins of the lyric of sociality’.Footnote ²⁹

But Mill’s solitary poet is not imagined in an entirely abstracted setting. He is at the centre of a very social institution: the prison. Mill says that poetry ‘has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next’.Footnote ³⁰ He compares the poet to a figure who was in this period at the centre of debates about prison reform and the ideal conditions for rehabilitating prisoners. Readers trained by Michel Foucault to recognise the figure of the prisoner as a self-disciplining subject under surveillance might see this theatrical scene of lyric production as a tragic one: lyric is the lament of a carceral soul abandoned to solitary confinement. Like the prisoner in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, who would never know if the guard were watching him, this lyric poet cannot tell if he is being overheard, no matter how much he attempts to look forth into the prison structure; but if the prisoner must behave as if he is always being watched, the poet must behave as if he never is.

‘What is Poetry’ was published in 1833 – for context, two years after Nat Turner’s Rebellion; the year that Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville published their report in Paris (and in translation in the United States) on the US penitentiary system; ten years before the opening of the ‘Model Prison’ at Pentonville in London. Pentonville was the first British prison to be built using the ‘separate system of confinement’, on the model of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, in which prisoners spent their days and nights in absolute isolation. However, even as Pentonville was being built, the United States was abandoning the separate system, which was costly, and disastrous for the health of the imprisoned people. Inspectors at Millbank prison in London admitted in 1841 that prisoners were being injured by their conditions; numerous prisoners were removed to Bedlam suffering from ‘mental derangement’ as a result of extended solitary confinement.Footnote ³¹ This may be why Mill’s comparison of poetry to ‘the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell’ is deleted in the later edition of the essay (published as ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ in 1859).

Mill’s essay helped to shape Victorian poetics and New Criticism, and continues to be a touchstone in contemporary studies of the lyric. Allen Grossman, for example, mixes Hegel and Mill in his argument that poems are ‘fictions of the privacy of other minds’; lyric, he writes, is ‘the social form of the unknowable singularity of the liberal individual’.Footnote ³² The lyric ‘I’ speaks from a ‘situation of psychic individuality’ (240), to a you constituted by that act of address, but who can also become an I (263). This dialectical relation is, for Grossman, coextensive with class hierarchy: ‘the conditions of the enjoyment of freedom by one class require the subordination of another class’; ‘the possessors of freedom are at war with the new claimants’ (272). These new claimants can become the subject of poetry only by casting off the fetters of an idealised history in which the power of the lyric speaker to represent him or herself is a remnant ‘of the privileged speech acts of kings’, while ‘the chorus is still a slave collectivity’ (273). Individuality is associated with regal modernity; collectivity with slave mentality and the archaic past. Grossman relates Mill’s liberal fiction to class antagonisms and the historical privileges of the lyric speaker, which depend on the subjugation of a portion of the audience who will, in time, become the subject of poetry. He characterises the history of the English lyric from the Renaissance to modernity as ‘the struggle of the lyric person toward self-representation as a man of the third estate’: a democratisation of verse, a republic in which any commoner can be the lyric king.

Revolutionising Verse

Numerous poets and critics have, like Grossman, drawn an analogy between political and poetic freedom. Plotting ‘the association of verse structure with the political ideas of its makers’, Paul Fussell ascribes the predominance of prosodic orderliness in the eighteenth century to the Restoration’s ‘victory over barbarity, disharmony, and regularity’ against ‘the forces of irregularity’ – wild philosophies and imaginations – that had driven the British civil wars. Later, he writes: ‘a literary generation terrified by the French revolution … saw in the rise of a more free and varied prosody a lurking and sinister Jacobinism’.Footnote ³³ These arguments exemplify a long tradition of associating formalism with political conservativism, and the avant-garde’s attack on inherited forms with the overthrow of hereditary capital and status. But Fussell argues against the perception that history is a record of progress towards artistic and political emancipation: ‘while political history can be shown to involve a very gradual total tendency toward, say, ideals of egalitarianism or public philanthropy, metrical history exhibits no such long-term “progressive” tendency. Meter has not really become “freer” over the centuries, and indeed “freedom” is not a virtue in meter: expressiveness is.’Footnote ³⁴

While Fussell’s historicism is dubious, the point of pressure he selects – the Restoration – reflects the importance of John Milton in analogies between casting off the fetters of conventional verse forms and overthrowing tyrants. In the note on ‘The Verse’ that prefaces Paradise Lost, Milton declares his aim to recover ‘ancient liberty’ formally, by rebelling against the ‘troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.’Footnote ³⁵ Blank verse is a diachronic manifestation of republicanism and messianic deliverance from the archaic wound of Adam’s sin. The poem explores multiple conditions of spiritual and physical bondage: Milton’s Satan, dangerously persuasive, rejects ‘splendid vassalage’ to a tyrannical creator, ‘preferring / Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp’ (2.252, 255–7). As always, this passage is ambivalent: Satan is rebelling against God, not a tyrant, and his rhetoric is fundamentally deceitful; but ‘hard liberty’ is preferable to monarchical subjugation in Milton’s human politics. Similarly, in Milton’s Restoration tragedy Samson Agonistes, Samson is ‘Bound with two cords; but cords to me were threads / Touched with the flame’ (ll.261–2).Footnote ³⁶ Samson’s easy triumph over the couplet of his shackles is partly attributed to the decadence of the Philistines, who are ‘by their vices brought to servitude’, ‘to love bondage more than liberty, / Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty’ (ll. 269–71). In both texts, luxuriant bondage risks turning the captive – whether falling angel or human warrior – into a ‘natural’ slave, and the hero’s self-liberation is imagined in a verse form free of the fetters of rhyme.

William Blake was deeply inspired by Milton’s poetic declaration of freedom from political tyranny, and the tyranny of rhyme, though he thought Milton had not gone far enough. Blake’s prophetic poetry and prose heaves with chained figures, straining against their fetters, whether these are ‘mind-forg’d’ or imposed by authoritarian others. He had a traumatic encounter with the law in 1803–4, when he was accused by the soldier John Scofield of cursing the king, and tried for treason; he may also have participated in the march on Newgate prison that was part of the Gordon Riots in 1780. Then, protestors attacked the prison’s gates with pickaxes and sledgehammers, climbed over walls and tore off the roofs to allow prisoners to escape the burning building.Footnote ³⁷ In his preface to Jerusalem, Blake describes his process of prosodic self-liberation:

We can read Blake’s argument in Marxian terms: what was once revolutionary in Milton, his bursting asunder of the productive forces of rhyme, has become ‘as much a bondage as rhyme itself’. Blake consequently cultivated his own idiosyncratic verse forms, from the lyrical songs through the blazing free verse of the prophetic books.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels repeatedly refer to history as a process of the casting-off of the ‘fetters’ and ‘yokes’ that constrained productive forces. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), the transition from feudalism to capitalism is represented as just such an escape: ‘the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.’Footnote ³⁹ Marxist critics have applied the metaphor to poetic constraints: forms that once provided fertile conditions for poetic production eventually prove excessively constraining and so must be burst asunder, resulting in progress towards human emancipation. Anthony Easthope, for example, characterises the emergence of blank verse as an analogue to the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and describes ‘the ideological opposition between the “social” and the “individual”, an opposition which envisages society as a “necessity” against and within which the individual finds his or her “freedom”’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Capitalism is the setting for the emergence of a verse technology that matches the politics of liberalism, a historical process that leads inexorably to the revolutionary crisis of free verse.

The twentieth-century avant-garde was particularly keen to conflate political and aesthetic freedom. As Richard Aldington wrote in the anonymous preface to the first Imagist anthology (1915): ‘We do not insist upon ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty.’Footnote ⁴¹ A full-throated overview of this form of thinking is given by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris in their Poems for the Millennium, whose introductions contend that ‘poetry set free can free or open up the human mind’.Footnote ⁴² The cataclysms of the twentieth century led to a backlash against modernism, and a desire to return to ‘prescriptive rhyme and meter’, which they describe as a ‘strange fear of “freedom”’. But the 1960s saw a resurgence of ‘free verse and freed words’.Footnote ⁴³ Aesthetic freedom, in such arguments, is part of the emancipatory progress of history. The liberties of poetic expression accompany, and give birth to, the revolutionary political imagination. But whether history is a line or a circle depends on who you’re asking. As Amiri Baraka attests in his short story ‘Northern Iowa’: ‘Verse is a turn, simply. Like a wheel, it has regular changes …. Except what we want is vers libre – free verse. Never having been that, free, we want it badly. For black people, freedom is our aesthetic and our ideology.’Footnote ⁴⁴

While my sympathies – and the selection of poetries explored in this book – lie strongly with revolutionaries who argue for the overthrow of the ideas of the ruling class, including its poetics, there also exists a strong counter-revolutionary tradition that seeks to conserve verse forms and the political orders they are said to represent. This tendency can be found in some surprising places. In his 1786 treatise on prosody, which he contemplated while walking in the Bois de Boulogne, Thomas Jefferson describes blank verse as ‘the most precious part of our poetry. The poet, unfettered by rhyme, is at liberty to prune his diction …. When enveloped in the pomp and majesty of his subject he sometimes even throws off the restraint of the regular pause.’ Jefferson echoes Milton’s note on ‘The Verse’ of Paradise Lost, and cites the opening of that poem as the case in point; but his discussion mixes revolutionary emancipation – at liberty, unfettered – with the reinstatement of pomp and majesty.Footnote ⁴⁵ Jefferson’s argument is surprising, given his loathing of the monarchies he had observed intimately as a minister in France. Along with the gains of a revolution against the fetters of rhyme, it acknowledges losses that must be balanced by establishing new sovereign qualities. Democracy, in poetry at least, is not entirely without its drawbacks.

A similar ambivalence can be found in the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835; second volume published 1840). Tocqueville argues that in aristocracies, certain ‘guiding principles’ of literary form are agreed; ‘strict canons will soon prescribe rules that may not be broken’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In a democracy, however, literary rules are reinvented by each generation. Instead of the order and regularity that characterise the literature of aristocratic regimes, democracies provide the writing of ‘vivid, lively emotions, sudden revelations, brilliant truths, or errors able to rouse them up and plunge them, almost by violence, into the middle of the subject’, while ‘formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised’ (473). Eventually, democratic literature will turn ‘man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate on himself alone’. The autonomy of the democratic text is sentimental and isolated, refusing formal or political heteronomy, and produced through negative freedom (in Isaiah Berlin’s sense of freedom from interference).

Tocqueville’s argument about poetics is shaped by his suspicion that democracy would lead to the tyranny of the majority. For William Carlos Williams, free verse was a sign of anarchy and the loss of communal values. He lamented that ‘Our lives also have lost all that in the past we had to measure them by, except outmoded standards that are meaningless to us. In the same way our verses, of which our poems are made, are left without any metrical construction of which you can speak.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The losses of traditional social meaning and of measure in poetry are related, as part of a historical process that begins with the French Revolution and with Whitman, who – Williams argues – was

For Williams, the chaos of liberation that succeeds the bursting asunder of the fetters of metrical order is both deadly and antisocial. Late in life, the poet argues that prosodic constraints signal the continuity of aesthetic and political consensus.

For many poets (including Hayes), constraint is the condition of freedom and an indispensable tool of poetic invention. Michel de Certeau discusses ‘the rules of meter and rhyme’ as ‘a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules within which improvisation plays’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This playfulness can be seen also in the ludic experiments of the Oulipo, whose extreme constraints did produce ample new discoveries, many of which still await us, in works such as Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Millliards de Poèmes. T. S. Eliot satirised poets like Aldington, and the notion that political and poetic freedom entail the overthrow of constraint: in his essay ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (1917), he argues that ‘Vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art.’ That free verse is not a ‘genuine verse-form’ is evident in the fact that ‘I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Negative freedom is not freedom at all. Similarly, Robert Frost’s famously curt dismissal of free verse from 1956 – ‘I’d just as soon play tennis with the net down’ – argues that form is a necessary instrument in the pursuit of new poetic ideas.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like Williams, he disparaged the notion of political activism: ‘Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material – the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.’Footnote ⁵¹ Form, constraint, give shape and meaning to the chaos of an individual life; without them the poem cannot survive. Of course, political freedom can only be nothing to someone who has always had it.

Fettered Bodies, Free Souls

Many of these analogies between political and prosodic freedoms draw on ancient ideas about the bondage of the body and the liberation of the rational mind or soul. Plato is the primary source of these arguments. His Phaedo and Apology for Socrates (the latter which Diderot translated while a prisoner in Vincennes in 1749) strongly influenced The Consolation of Philosophy (Consolatio), written by Boethius in the early sixth century. Imprisoned by Theodoric in Ticinum (modern-day Pavia), Boethius imagines being visited by Lady Philosophia, who counsels him to enjoy the freedom of his mind and be released from the fetters of the body. This prosimetric text opens with the speaker lamenting his fate in (morally dubious) elegiac distich – the metre associated with Ovidian erotic elegy, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 9 – and surrounded by the Muses.Footnote ⁵² Philosophy arrives, banishes the sluttish Muses and begins her teaching on the nature of the universe, determinism and free will. With this recusatio of carnality, Boethius begins to discover the inalienable freedom of the philosophical mind.

In Chaucer’s translation, Philosophy laments that the prisoner is ‘constreynyd to looken on the fool erthe’, physically and intellectually turning towards the ground – ‘his nekke is pressed with hevy cheynes’.Footnote ⁵³ The figure of chains recurs throughout the text, for obvious reasons, but usually to represent forms of self-constraint; the mind clouded with grief and fear is ‘bownde with brydles’ (I.7, p. 16). The poem builds towards a reversal of this status, revealing to the prisoner that while his body is constrained, his mind remains free. It does not, however, fantasise about a condition of total freedom from restraint. Philosophia, like nature, is providentially ‘bound’: ‘Ther nis nothinge unbownde fram his oolde lawe ne forleetheth the werke of his propre estat’ (I.5, p. 12). To sever these binds, whether they are the binds that keep the stars hovering in the air or those that sequester lust inside the sanctity of marriage, would only lead to chaos. The speaker probes Philosophy on the relation between this intrinsically determinist nature and the potential for human freedom, and she answers by expounding on how the body, and the intellect that surrenders to wickedness, are themselves prisons. The chains that preserve order and connection in the universe are generative constraints, but the prison of the self can be, must be, escaped – into mental freedom.

Platonic and Boethian arguments for the inalienable liberty of the mind, however painfully the body is constrained, have been central to prison poetry for millennia: ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor Iron bars a Cage / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an Hermitage’ (Richard Lovelace); ‘The form beneath its chains may pine, / The soul is mighty still’ (John Greenleaf Whittier); ‘there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’ (Virginia Woolf). Gerard Manley Hopkins compared the spirit trapped in the body to a caged bird longing for escape: ‘As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage, / Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.’Footnote ⁵⁴ The bird who soars away from the earth and achieves a panoramic perspective is a common emblem of Boethian consolation, which we’ll encounter again in the discussion of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry. These images can also be found in the attestation of Jackie Ruzas, a writer incarcerated in New York, that ‘I write because I can’t fly.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The Boethian argument that prison is paradoxically liberating is also echoed in ‘Two Fragments’, by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost, a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay:

Transcendence of the fetters of the camp is imagined as flight, soaring aloft ‘on the wings of thought’ and being able therefore to achieve an unlimited perspective that distinguishes the poet from the ‘slaves’ who guard him. As his fellow prisoner Abdulaziz writes: ‘My spirit is free in the heavens, while my body is overpowered by chains’ (23). The Pentagon censored and confiscated many poems by Guantánamo detainees, advising that the ‘content and format’ of poetry meant it presented a ‘special risk’ to national security (4). The suggestion is that form conveys secret information, such as the fact that the poet lives and feels despite all efforts to erase him – the lyric is a writ of habeus corpus. We are back, in a sense, with Mill’s solitary prisoner, pretending not to know anyone is listening not as a guarantee of authenticity but as a way of evading the censor and reaching beyond the barren world of the camp.

Lyric Whiteness

Poetry and Bondage is advertised as offering a new history and theory of the lyric. But I’ve so far postponed answering a fundamental question: what do I mean by lyric?

As a verse genre it is proverbially impossible to define.Footnote ⁵⁷ The word lyric derives from the Greek ‘lyra’, of or pertaining to the lyre; thus (says the Oxford English Dictionary) lyric is ‘characteristic of song’. The first use of the word lyric in English dates to the 1580s, when it was used to describe a melodious kind of poetry; Thomas Campion wrote in 1602 that lyric poems ‘are apt to be soong to an instrument’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But as Bevis observes, the word ‘lyric’ ‘only arrived on the scene in the third century BCE, when scholars of the Alexandrian library sought to preserve poems on the page whose musical settings had been lost’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bevis points out that this loss is encoded in the Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry, whose entry for lyric in the fourth edition by Virginia Jackson describes it as ‘from its inception a term used to describe a music that could no longer be heard, an idea of poetry characterised by a lost collective experience’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lyric’s melancholy can be found in its apostrophe and address, its dialectic of beloved and reader, and its memory of lost songs and lost worlds – worlds of communal rhythms and social consent.

W. R. Johnson, reflecting on the lack of intact textual sources for archaic Greek lyric, remarks, ‘We do not want to admit the fact of this loss, so we open the fragments and try to read … poems that are not there.’Footnote ⁶¹ There is good reason, when reading lyric, to read what is ‘not there’, or who. Moten finds in Amiri Baraka ‘a mode of lyricism that has been explored and cultivated precisely by folks who have both been refused access to that normative subjectivity but who have also refused that normative subjectivity themselves’.Footnote ⁶² The lyric ‘I’ makes a claim to humanness, and points to a trail of losses. In following that trail, I may enact what Stephen Best has called ‘melancholy historicism’: a focus on what is irretrievable or lost in in the (lyric) archive, which counters that loss with an unresolvable attachment, substituting the projective identification of the feeling scholar for acceptance of ‘the past’s turning away as an ethical condition of my desire for it’.Footnote ⁶³ My desire is to rethink the history of lyric by steady, historicist, but yes sometimes melancholic, reflection, which recognises that for some poets historically excluded from its use, the point is not only to deconstruct, but also to rebuild the lyric subject: as Erica Hunt put it, ‘I have had to invent the person for whom poetry is possible’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have plotted the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry, a monopolisation by lyric from the mid-eighteenth century onwards that has made many of the other genres inaccessible to modern audiences.Footnote ⁶⁵ Stephen Burt and Jonathan Culler have exposed the many historical omissions required to frame lyric as an Enlightenment invention.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the power of this paradigm – the association of the lyric with selves and feelings – can lead to strange literary backformations. Paul Allen Miller argues for a much earlier invention of the lyric – to the mid-Hellenistic period – when books collecting short poems began to be written (displacing oral poetic genres), because only across such collections could a ‘lyric consciousness’ be gathered: one ‘which projects the image of an individual and highly self-reflexive subject’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The origin of the lyric, identified by Miller as a genre that ‘separates the individual from his or her communal ties and responsibilities, and examines his or her most intimate thoughts and feelings’ (127), is discovered by looking for a thematics of individualised subjectivity.

A key site for thinking through the relation of lyric to subjectivity is Hegel’s Aesthetics. For Hegel, lyric speaks for the individual torn free from the collective; in it, the mind must ‘press on to a free portrayal of itself’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this process of historical emancipation, lyric delivers ‘the heart from the slavery to passion by making it see itself’ and ‘makes of it an object purified from all accidental moods’ (1141). Lyric is the expression of freedom through the sublated particularity of individual feeling. It absorbs the object world and ‘stamps’ it with the poet’s ‘inner consciousness’; it raises the ‘inner life’ and the singularity of the subject to ‘a universal validity’ (1111). Lyric transcends the song, whose simple expression of feeling ‘is renewed at every season’, except ‘in the case of oppressed peoples, who have been cut off from every advance and have not attained the ever newly animated joy of making poetry’ (1143). The songs of oppression are simple, direct and lacking in conflict; they are unlike the lyric, in which ‘the poet’s own subjective freedom … flashes out in the struggle against the topic which is trying to master it’ (1142). This struggle is staged in terms that recall his dialectic of lordship and bondage. It is the metaphoric struggle of the liberal individual against the topic, not the actual struggles of the singing, oppressed peoples, that produces poetic illumination. Hegel’s poetics sketch out an intimacy between lyric, individual subjectivity and freedom. The capacity to discover in one’s feelings an objective universality, for the subject to ‘tear itself free’ from the existent worlds of prose and folk song (1127), is a consequence of historic and political development that moves away from the commons, towards an ambitiously solitary lyric ‘I’. That Hegel conceives the emancipated subject of lyric as white, male and European is evident not only from his Aesthetics, but from his remarks about Africa’s exclusion from history and the need to ‘tame’ the Negro, and his horror at the Haitian Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁹

Poetry and Bondage traverses a long history of lyric poetry, from Ovid through the present day, and includes laureates like Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe and Emily Dickinson, alongside those poets who are collectivised by the transmission of their work through anthologies, criticism and other institutions. While much of it dwells with historic and contemporary Black poetries, my intention is not a rebalancing of any canon so much as a fierce interrogation of the coupling of whiteness and lyric. Instead, I ask: what can readings in the history of lyric and its critics tell us about the forms whiteness takes – by which I mean not only its historical violence, but also what Cheryl Harris calls the ‘common premise’ whiteness shares with property: ‘a right to exclude’?Footnote ⁷⁰ If whiteness is a form of enclosure that bears comparison to the enclosures of the commons and the ‘mastery’ of human and animal life, how is that form brought to bear on the enclosures that constitute the lyric?

These questions will preoccupy me throughout this book, and as such, distinguish my project from what is known as ‘new lyric studies’, whose uncritical whiteness has been critiqued by a number of scholars.Footnote ⁷¹ Mark Jeffreys anticipated the lyricisation argument in a 1995 essay – ‘lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.’ As Jeffreys puts it, ‘poetry was pushed into a lyric ghetto’ through the dominance and privilege of the novel.Footnote ⁷² Whether referring to the original Jewish ghetto in early modern Venice, or the contemporary urban neighbourhoods largely populated by working class people of colour, Jeffreys implies that lyric’s social function is constrained, carceral and racialised. In the cramped margins, the ghetto, poetry languishes in insignificance, dominated by the lyric.

Jeffreys’s metaphor is an example of what Toni Morrison analysed as the tendency of white writers to explore their autonomy through the ‘power of blackness’: ‘the slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness’.Footnote ⁷³ Using these ‘conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies’ as ‘playground for the imagination’, white writers came to know the American self ‘as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licenced and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfilment of destiny’ (52). So, too, across the history of poetics, do the people bound in prisons and chattel slavery become tropes with which privileged subjects think about creative freedom and obligation.

Alexander Weheliye asks, ‘what different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?’Footnote ⁷⁴ In response this book questions: what lyric modalities might come to light if the liberal humanist figure of the white poet is displaced by those poetic subjects whose practices and experiences were crucial to, but also erased from, the theorisation of poetry? Who is lost when the story of the lyric is told?

Frank B. Wilderson III critiques the utility of Blackness as a ‘metatheory’, a lens that shows that ‘Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures’, including fantasies of universal liberation and claims of a shared ‘universal humanity’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Morrison, Weheliye and Wilderson’s thinking offers a different way of approaching the synonymity of lyric and humanness that recurs throughout literary history, and particularly in the context of the writing of bondage, in which being able to become a lyric poet is an index of the survival of the human in situations of utmost oppression. Saying ‘I’ in a poem lays claim to the privileges of subjectivity from which some categories of people have been historically excluded; it affirms that the particular experiences of that subject can be incubated lyrically into a universal validity; it also attests to an ongoing or emergent humanness, through the interwoven freedoms and constraints of poetic form.

This may also be why the figure of the animal reappears so frequently throughout this book. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has theorised that discourses of liberal humanism produce a dichotomy of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ that is ‘predicated on the abjection of blackness, which is not based on figurations of blackness as “animal-like” but rather casts black people as ontologically plastic’.Footnote ⁷⁶ That plasticity will recur in lyric contexts through the invocation of half-human animals: tamed hawks or deer as women, tigers that resemble Haitian revolutionaries, horses made equivalent to Africans thrown overboard, imprisoned Black singers who resemble birds and who are treated like dogs, masochists who wish to draw carts and be treated like slaves, ploughmen indistinguishable from their teams, orangutans that compose odes and, only rarely, companion species.

Notes on Method

As can be intuited by my flight from Boethius to Guantánamo, or from archaic Greek poetry to Erica Hunt, this book seeks to draw out continuities of thought and practice in the longue durée of lyric constraint. It offers pairings of poets, often across wide historical gulfs: Thomas Wyatt and Rob Halpern; Emily Dickinson and M. NourbeSe Philip; Ovid and Marlowe and Algernon Charles Swinburne and Hopkins; Lisa Robertson and Phillis Wheatley. In each case, I’m committed to providing historicist, immanent interpretations of individual practices, while also recognising through comparative readings the long duration of structures of poetic thinking, feeling and imagining. These readings are aligned with similarly paired analyses of collectives, institutions and structures: the Romantic and the contemporary prison; African American folk song, white folklorists and the New Critics; Roman and Victorian sexualities and imperial politics. Moving between individuals and structures, the book’s opening section considers the prison as a site of bondage, in early modern England, Britain and the United States in the long nineteenth century, and contemporary mass incarceration. Section 2 dwells on chattel slavery and song, as well as the institutionalisation of literary criticism. Section 3 turns to the pleasures of bondage, looking backward to the normalising of heterosexuality and soft masculinity as an alternative to Roman imperial power in Ovid’s verse, and to the sexological studies of the nineteenth century and the pathologisation of sadomasochism.

My aim is not to establish a genealogy between the paired poets, implying that a trope or a tactic becomes an heritable characteristic across historical generations, or to affirm some teleological account of lyric emancipation. I am thinking in circles, not lines. These diachronic pairings instead propose a set of relationships between contemporary and historic poetics that is figural, in the sense elaborated by Eric Auerbach. Auerbach’s famous essay on ‘figura’ explores the shaping of biblical interpretation and rhetoric by the persistence of a particular trope or image, a figure. Auerbach refers to this as ‘figural prophecy’, a relation of textual indeterminacy and contingency in which past and future no longer fit into a linear mode of anticipation and completion. Figura:

As a result, history remains ‘forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation’ (58). This event, the concealed eventuality, the to-come, is the future conditional, a space of possibility that enfolds the non-identity of past instants into one fulfilment.

The pairings of poets in this book emphasise the provisionality and contingency of any historical moment of lyric self-determination. They are intended to draw out the radical potentialities of past and present poetries, to identify how the breaking open of possibilities at specific moments also foreclosed others and to recognise how those apertures continue to give structure to our ideas about what lyric can or cannot do. I hope that the critiques of individual authors add up to a critical poetics. But they are not meant to be proscriptive. Nor does this book, long as it is, pretend to exhaust the topic of poetry as bondage, which could have led us through Milton, Blake, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, Dawn Lundy Martin and numerous others. I’ve also not been able to grapple with other significant sites of bondage: the camp and the asylum chief among them. And if the poems I do discuss are, like this book, limited, then by acknowledging and understanding those limits, we can perhaps expand the possibilities of the lyric beyond its current constraints.

The figural method describes not just a poetics, but a politics. The histories of slavery, mass incarceration, imperial warfare or the pathologisation of sexual difference continue. My readings follow the arguments of activists and abolitionists whose demands for restorative justice and reparation make profound claims about historicity, and a relation between past and present that is contingent in senses not imagined by Auerbach.

Throughout this book, I foreground not an abstract or generic scholarly reading, but my own reading, limited by and situated in the particularities of my own life, and the structures I inhabit and reproduce. I am a white, cis-female, middle-class academic from a working-class family in the United States. I have a permanent job and dual citizenship in the United Kingdom, where I work at a ‘Russell Group’ (elite) university situated in Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived local boroughs in England. Some 30 per cent of my students come from families whose income is less than £15,000 a year, and 60 per cent of them are people of colour, but they are taught by faculty who are almost entirely white. These facts are not intended to signal a set of virtues or their impossibility, but to explain why analysing especially the ways that whiteness has shaped the production, reading and criticism of lyric within the academy is important to me. This book reflects the many things I have learned from my students.

It is also a response to Joseph North’s call for a return to criticism as a materialist and ‘programmatic commitment, not just to analysing and describing the culture, but to taking action to change it’.Footnote ⁷⁸ It follows lyric, which is associated with the inalienable freedoms of personhood, into the abysses where personhood has been annihilated by agents whose categories of identity I share. It recognises the urgent ‘critical challenge’ posed by Caleb Smith: ‘to pursue, perhaps to unmake, the harrowing concept of the human on which the prison rests’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It pays tribute to all I’ve learned from Black feminist thought, to the importance of what Christina Sharpe names ‘wake work’: of thinking about ‘about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work’.Footnote ⁸⁰ As a white critic, I have tried to respond ethically to the call of that work by thinking about the enclosure fabricated by white thought: the hold, the cell and, sometimes, the lyric.

Poetry and Bondage is an effort to understand how dwelling in the gap or wound that separates lyric as an expression of human liberty (so free that it can even imagine itself enchained) from the lyrics actually produced in bondage can open up new ways of thinking about poetry: new forms of empathy, being and relating. I want to gather from the fields of poetic practice a nourishing array, to militate against enclosure and to celebrate the remedies for human suffering poems offer. I seek not the poetry of privileged re-enactment and proxy suffering that puts the prisoner to work as a figure of its own artistic limits, but waylaid voices, open commons and unspeakable imaginaries: the poetics of bondage and emancipation that can be found everywhere in the history and theory of the lyric.