Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660-1810 (review)

Review 2

One result of James G. Basker's "vast archeological dig" is that "the quality of the material varies wildly, from the sublime to the insufferable" (xxxiii). Given Basker's content-based criteria of selection, and the spatial constraints of any anthology, many of the more than 400 texts by more than 250 different authors are inevitably represented by passages of varying length. The necessary sacrifice of the length and textual integrity of individual longer works is compensated for, however, by the range of materials. Similarly, Basker's decision to restrict his own editorial annotations to bibliographical citations gives him space to include more primary material in what will very likely remain the most capacious and comprehensive one-volume collection of versified references to slavery. Basker's relatively brief introduction and head notes to each author are impressively economical and cogent, offering a wealth of useful information and critical insight elegantly expressed.

Amazing Grace significantly contributes to the decade-old recuperation of texts by authors of African descent. Basker includes a number of works by authors of African descent not found in recent anthologies also aimed at student and scholarly audiences.¹Amazing Grace includes at least 20 black poets, perhaps more since some of the anonymous writers represented might also have been black. Besides the well-known poets such as Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, there are less familiar figures, including Francis Williams and an anonymous black veteran of the American Revolution. And readers will be surprised to discover several authors familiar to them as prose writers given the recognition they deserve as writers of verse as well: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Benjamin Banneker.

This anthology is remarkably error-free for such an ambitious project. One goof is locating George Whitefield's Bethesda, Georgia, orphan house in South Carolina. And, of course, one could quibble with some assessments, historical and critical. For example, Equiano's bookselling tours in the English, Irish, and Scottish provinces during the 1790s may be cited as evidence that encounters with black people, at least by that time, were more widespread than Basker allows. Basker makes the understandable error of relying on Edward Long's hostile account of the free black Jamaican Francis Williams. The true story of Williams's life was far more interesting than Long allows.² Basker misattributes to Long, albeit hesitantly, lines written by Alexander Pope. Long intentionally misquotes Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), lines 418–423, significantly substituting "Negroe" for Pope's "Lord" in line 420. Long's misquotation does, however, illustrate Basker's point about "the tenacity of racial prejudice in the mind of this Jamaican judge" (216).

Long's appropriation of Pope is one of many instances of intertextuality found in Basker's selections. Intertextual allusions, appropriations, parodies, and quotations emphasize the extent to which the abolitionists and the far fewer proslavery authors sought to enhance their own credentials as poets as well as demonstrate that they were participants in a movement. Within this newly recovered "shadow canon," readers will find many signs of traditions consciously being constructed as writers allude to or cite predecessors, such as Wheatley or William Cowper, who had earlier expressed a black voice or attacked the evils of slavery. Quotations from Cowper's poems, for example, are almost as common in abolitionist verse before 1810 as they would become in nineteenth-century African American slave narratives.

Consequently, Amazing Grace enables scholars to see the eighteenth-century black poets in their transatlantic historical and literary contexts. By including white as well as black poets who addressed the issues of slavery and the slave trade, Basker performs the much-needed service of reconstructing the discursive context in which black and white authors wrote. In effect, Basker restores many of the white authors in Amazing Grace to the historical roles they play in Thomas Clarkson's History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade (1808). Basker's inclusion of black authors underscores the significance of Clarkson's removal of every black writer from his account of the...