Read more
Offering a new theory of poetic constraint, this book analyses contributions of bound people to the history of the lyric.
List of contents
Introduction: The Fetters of Verse; Part I. Lyric Cells: 1. The Music of Fetters: Thomas Wyatt and the Beginnings of English Carceral Lyric; 2. The Ligature: Rob Halpern's Common Place and the Limits of Desire; 3. Each in Their Separate Hell: Solitary Confinement in the Long Nineteenth Century; 4. Hours of Lead: The Modern US Prison, Segregation and Solidarity; Part II. The Songs of Slavery: 3. Bind Me - I Still Can Sing: Emily Dickinson at the Boundaries of Lyric; 4. The Story that Cannot Be Told: M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!, from Form to Performance; 5. The Sound Came from Everywhere and Nowhere: African-American Song as Lyric Work; 6. Singing at the Window: New Criticism and the Evolution of Lyric; Part III. Pleasures and Ornaments: 9. A New Made Wound: Sadomasochistic Triumphs and Missing Feet in Ovid's Elegies; 10. The Ecstatic Lash of the Poetic Line: Swinburne, Hopkins, and the Pleasures of Bondage; 11. Soft Architecture: Lisa Robertson and Bondage as Ornament; 12. Silken Fetters: Phillis Wheatley and Ornament as Bondage.
About the author
Andrea Brady is Professor of Poetry, School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (2006), The Blue Split Compartments (2021), The Strong Room (2016), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability (2012), and Wildfire (2010). She has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the National Humanities Center, and performed throughout Europe, Canada, the United States, Lebanon, and Chile.
Summary
Tracing metaphors of bondage in poetry from Ovid through the present day, Poetry and Bondage analyses the contributions of bound people to the history of the lyric. It brings canonical and contemporary poets together with the songs of the plantation and the lyrics of mass incarceration.
