Failed Instruments: Abolition and the Lyric in Antebellum America

This dissertation on the evolution of the nineteenth-century American lyric poetry and the abolition of slavery in the United States describes the perceived need to promote political action in antebellum reform poetry as 'poetic instrumentality.' It focuses on how two schools of antebellum poets, the one comprised of abolitionist reformers (like Phillis Wheatley, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown) and the other of Transcendentalist literary theorists and proto-modernist poets (like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson) were haunted by mutually constitutive 'anxieties of reform.' The reformers feared that, in deigning to preach instead of sing, they had abandoned the realm of the Beautiful and set aside the true commitments of poetry. While the Transcendentalists, despite their insistence on self-reliance and rustic independence, could not escape the lingering recognition that they had abandoned the central Practical imperative the reformers had established for poetry in their era—the need to free the slaves. The Romantic imperative for poets to produce original imaginative insight codified in part in Emerson's essays is, the project argues, itself responsive to the demotic, practical poetics deployed during the peak of the American antislavery movement. The anxieties of reform can be traced within the age's antislavery rhetoric, poetic theory, and, of course, within the poetry itself. Reform rhetoric was poeticized, while, at the same time, Transcendentalist poetic theory was 'reform-itized,' with Transcendentalist writers developing a new, ontologically expansive 'poetics of action' in response to the reformist impulse. Consequently, the dissertation tells the story of what poetry did to American abolitionism, and what abolitionism did to, and perhaps for, American poetry. The project builds on the work of Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, Max Cavitch, Meredith McGill and others in the field of Historical American Poetics even as it develops critiques of the historicization of the lyric offered by scholars like Paul Fry, Jonathan Culler, Cristanne Miller, and Elissa Zellinger. The dissertation's most significant overarching argument is that abolitionist poetry and rhetoric played a foundational, though hitherto overlooked, role in the process of nineteenth-century lyricization.