The American Studies Consortium and the Poetry and Poetics Workshop present a lecture by Prof. Virginia Jackson (Irvine).

The history of American poetics is a mostly untold story, partly because nineteenth-century American poetics has been misunderstood as having begun with "the Romantic lyric," an idealized genre associated with British literary history, then having proceeded to Victorian or "genteel" poetry, before it entered American poetics only in Modernism, which has been understood as a phenomenon of the first decades of the twentieth century, a period in which "free verse" poets broke with inherited or imported "conventions." This way of characterizing the history of American poetry is reductive, but some version of it has been the unstated norm for so long that we may have ceased to realize how reductive it really is. This paper will focus on the example of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in order to begin to tell a different story about the history of American poetry.