Apostrophe, Animation, and Racism

Abstract

Do poems speak to you? Consider poems in which you encounter the signature version of excited Romantic poetic address that begins with a single letter adorned with its own exclamation mark: “O!” Don’t you imagine that someone is saying (or shouting or whispering or gasping) “O!”? Does it matter that you don’t know who that person might be? Don’t you feel moved to respond, if only silently? Don’t you want to imagine that overseeing or overhearing that address brings you into its range, thus making you feel as if you were joining a collective of such responsive silences? Nineteenth-century American poets often hoped you would feel this way, and most modern versions of poetics still do. But many Black poets in the US in the nineteenth century came to recognize that the lyricizing ambition of the apostrophic address that would come to be identified with Romantic and modern lyric threatened to make lyric poetry’s addressees universally White. Black Romantic poets repeatedly expressed anxieties about apostrophe’s racialized ambitions, though the history and theory of American poetics have both been premised on an ignorance of that expression.

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