Virginia Jackson explores the complexities of recognizing and defining Emily Dickinson's poetry, emphasizing how her largely unpublished work shaped perceptions of her writing. The book examines the editorial choices and cultural practices that influenced the presentation of Dickinson's verses, which were often found in unconventional formats like letters and personal notes. By questioning our reading habits and the criteria for identifying poetry, Jackson invites readers to reconsider the legacy of Dickinson's work and the role of editors in shaping literary history.
"In Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, Virginia Jackson argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. This is not a history of American poetry that begins with the Puritans and stretches to the present, or that jumps from the British Romantics to Walt Whitman, or that restricts the influence of African American poetry to a separate tradition; instead, this book emphasizes the many ways in which early Black poets invented what Phillis Wheatley Peters called "the deep design" of American lyric. Through readings of the poetics of Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper-as well as the poetics of now-neglected but once-popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-Jackson suggests that Black poetics inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the last two centuries. Thus this book represents not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as an idea of poetry based on genres of poems (ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, epistles, etc.) gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people (Black, White, male, female, Indigenous, etc.), almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Like everything else in America, what we now think lyric is can be traced back to the twisted paths that have determined what we now think people are and can be. This book tells that story, the story of American lyric"-- Provided by publisher
