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

Review 1

In a heroic undertaking of nearly 800 pages, James G. Basker has assembled approximately 400 poems, or poetic fragments, about slavery that were published in English by more than 250 writers. He likens the project to a "vast archaeological dig" (xxxiii); his excavations have uncovered everything from beautiful masterpieces to humdrum shards, from operas and musical comedies, through dramatic pageants and epics, to doggerel and gravestone inscriptions. He confines the temporal boundaries of his anthology to the "long" eighteenth century. Before about 1660, he notes, slavery was not of major cultural or economic importance in the English Atlantic, and after about 1810, "slavery in British and American cultural life became two different stories" (xxxviii). Within this period, then, he sees an essentially unified Anglophone world, and his aim is to be as inclusive as possible. The volume incorporates poems, or parts of poems, that bring "slavery into view, whether as its main subject, in a single passage or character, or, more glancingly, in bits of allusion or metaphor" (xxxiii). Basker knows he has not identified every poem that mentions slavery (perhaps a supplement will be forthcoming); in some cases, particular poems about slavery are known to have existed but are no longer recoverable. Nevertheless, this collection is remarkably comprehensive, reprinting a substantial amount of verse for the first time.

If slavery was important in the Anglo-American collective imagination, it became increasingly so over the period of this anthology. This study documents the emergence of a widespread awareness of the subject. The century 1660–1760 saw the publication of less than a fifth of the poems included in this anthology, whereas the half century from 1760 to 1810 witnessed a mounting surge of publications, with the last two decades accounting for 45 percent of the total. In the late seventeenth century, the mention of slavery was often incidental; by the end of the period, whole epics were devoted to the subject. Apparently, a lag existed between the sentiments of most poets and the reality of an expansive and vibrant institution. The cultural and economic significance of slavery was evident by the turn of the eighteenth century. By then most British colonial trade was dependent on the labor of enslaved people. Yet the upsurge in poetic interest in slavery took largely an antislavery position. More than nine of every ten poems challenged and denounced slavery; only an insignificant minority (beginning with John Saffin in 1701 and encompassing most notably James Boswell in 1791) defended the institution. As Basker notes, the "poems at the very close of the book mark an almost uniform crescendo of jubilation. The slave trade had been abolished on both sides of the Atlantic and slavery itself seemed destined to end soon after" (xlvii). But why was so little proslavery verse written?¹ This question needs answering.

Why confine the anthology just to poetry? Basker's answer is essentially twofold. One reason is pragmatic: it is a way to delimit the material, include a wide range of a single literary form, and thereby establish webs of affiliation and association among the varied practitioners. The other reason is idealistic: poetry, it is claimed, can best speak to the unspeakable. Though conceding that the quality of the included material "varies wildly, from the sublime to the insufferable" (xxxiii), Basker maintains that poetry best transforms ugliness into beauty, sin into virtue. The transformative power of poetry commands attention. Thus, the hymn that gives the book its title derived from a penitent slave trader, John Newton, who in 1779 celebrated his deliverance from the sinfulness of the slave trade. He was the wretch, once lost then found, once blind but who now can see, saved by amazing grace, how sweet the sound. And the poem later underwent its own transmutation, assuming a life as a Negro spiritual. It is a metaphor for the best work in this anthology, yet Wylie Sypher was not far wrong when describing much...