The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.

This chapter shows how the derangement of the senses and isolation of the individual that are idealised modes of Romantic and post-Romantic verse are hideously intensified in the contemporary supermax. Its focus is on solitary confinement in US prisons as a way of preventing the formation of solidarities. As such, it explores the conditions for producing poetry in prison: different models of the workshop, reform and revolution, and imprisoned writers’ relationships to the carceral and poetic institution. It discusses the trope of incommunicability in prison writing. It discusses the psychic and physical effects of life ‘in the hole’, drawing on writings by numerous well-known and lesser-known imprisoned poets. It ends with the claim that it is the contemporary abolitionist movement that is the true inheritor and defender of the Romantic imagination.

Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.

Lisa Robertson’s feminist poetics engage with the histories of sexualised domination, and indulge erotic pleasures while committing to ‘return to the sex of my thinking’. Robertson’s poetry seeks to free feminised subjects from the constraints of poetic patriarchy, embodied by Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch and Rousseau. Conflating Lucretius with the Story of O, she proposes a theory of reading as sensual pleasure and domination. But she explicitly rejects the imperial militancy of the Ovidian tradition, and inverts the gendered relations of domination and subjection associated with Petrarchanism in her book The Men. Her poems show how a feminised subject might resist the logic of domination and bondage that inheres in much classical erotic poetry through a ‘soft architecture’ – a term she borrows from Gottfried Semper. Robertson’s aesthetics of precarity (the shack, the blackberry) incorporates feminised embodiment into the patriarchal city (Rome) or the settler one (Vancouver). Through her art-historical and architectural interests in the fold, fashion and textiles, Robertson seeks to translate bondage into ornament, and release the lyric from the constraint of a singular ‘I’ into a more collective and transient impersonality.

Poetry and Bondage begins in the late sixteenth century, with a new reading of Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poems in the context of his multiple experiences of imprisonment and surveillance. Wyatt is often regarded as a key figure in the initiation of an ‘inward turn’ or lyric interiority, and of modern English lyric. While such readings are problematic, they tell us something about what we think lyric is. Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates the importance of prisons for developing English-language lyric habits of address, intimacy and conceptualisations of power and selfhood. The chapter focuses on the various nets, chains, clogs and fetters in Wyatt’s poems, in relation to the conditions of amorous and political servitude they depict. It discusses how that servitude is enacted and challenged through formal constraints, such as the rondeau or the sonnet. It relates Wyatt’s tropes of bondage to the depiction of human and animal life in his poems and to the akratic subject’s obedience and resistance to sovereignty. It includes close readings of two of his most famous poems, ‘They flee…’ and ‘Whoso list to hunt’.

This chapter begins with discussions of two early accounts of the sorrow songs, by the African American activist Charlotte Forten and the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These early accounts drew on both Romantic approaches to folk song and ballad and scientific or naturalist taxonomies to construct African American song-making as both historical and ahistorical. Folklorists were excited to encounter in these songs an example of a genuine ‘folk’ culture in the United States that exemplified evolutionary theories of poetic development. The chapter discusses the ‘primitive’ ballad and the ‘evolved’ lyric, and moves on to a study of the interactions between Howard Odum, a sociologist of the New South, and the Southern Agrarians, a group of scholars based at Vanderbilt University, many of whom later became part of the movement known as New Criticism. It argues that African American song is the repressed other of the New Critical idea of the lyric, and that many of those ideas are rooted in racist ideology about a pastoral, paternalistic South. It concludes with a close reading of a song whose roots can be traced to sixteenth-century England, adapted to the conditions of American chattel slavery.

This chapter offers a history of solitary confinement as a disciplinary technique, which emerged in the late eighteenth century as a replacement for the chaotic and degrading spectacle of corporal punishment. Key to that history are the ‘separate’ and the ‘silent’ regimes, whose most influential exponents were in the US, at prisons in Philadelphia (Eastern State) and New York (Auburn). The chapter uses the figure of the chaplain, and the inventive ways prisoners circumvented controls on their speech and inspection of their souls, to contextualise the solitude and introspection of the Romantic lyric. These contexts are rendered much more specific in readings of Wordsworth’s poetry of solitude and of penal discipline, and his evolution from the compassionate friend of ‘The Convict’ in Lyrical Ballads to the patron of capital punishment in his ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’.

The tropes of bondage that pervade Emily Dickinson’s lyric poems were significant to contemporary American accounts of the lyric and its relation to individual liberty. Dickinson is often held up as the paradigmatic lyric poet: reclusive, but unbounded in her imagination; pure voice, speaking on the other side of the door. Dickinson herself returns endlessly to tropes of the prison, chains and bonds. At times she even expresses a sadistic delight in imagining the torture of others. The chapter argues that, given the convulsions of her time and her family’s direct political engagements with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Civil War, it is surprising that slavery is almost entirely absent from Dickinson’s poetry. The chapter reflects on the tropes of incarceration or bondage in Dickinson’s poetics, to consider what the missing slave means for the model of lyric that she has come to represent.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.