A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов
literary and cultural tradition. The past and present are dominant modes of consciousness, with the future conceptualized as a direct and immediate extension of the present. Relationships are described as being in a potential state of mutual perpetual communication, even after the death of the body. Individual identity and value are explicitly connected with community identity, membership, and contribution.
Although they are indeed prominent and impactful as beloved messages of hope and perseverance on political, social, religious, musical, and national levels, there is a perplexing pattern of ignoring the spirituals as the great literature that they are. The spirituals are routinely excluded from textbooks of African American as well as American literature, and when they do appear, it is frequently as a short assortment relegated to such sub-categories as “folk,” “vernacular,” or “oral” traditions without contextualizing commentary or analysis of their literary qualities. Their influence on African American literature is indisputable across all time periods on such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Melvin B. Tolson, Calvin C. Hernton, Margaret Walker, Waring Cuney, Sterling A. Brown, Robert Hayden, Sonia Sanchez, Lance Jeffers, Amiri Baraka, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Douglas Kearney, Russell Atkins, Kamau Brathwaite, Raymond Patterson, Fenton Johnson, and countless others. Sterling A. Brown ascribed their importance to their being self-defining instead of an externally imposed description of the African American experience. Alain Locke considered them to be both a racial product and to hold universal meaning for all Americans. John Lovell, Jr. contrasted their disregard with other revered national literatures:
…an epic tradition in the class of the Iliad, the Songs of Roland, or the Lays of the Nibelungs, with no clear analysis of the soil from which they sprung or the process of their growth. In other epic traditions, patient scholars have found seeds of racial and national culture. They look there first. And yet for how many years have the dabblers in American “Negroitis” ignored or treated with disgraceful cavalierness the heart of the Negro spirituals!
(Lovell 1969, p. 30)
Lovell’s outrage is a call to rectify this blind injustice. The spirituals deserve a place at the bedrock of the canon as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential bodies of American poetry.
The systemic failure to respect and regard slave songs as indispensable American lyric poetry goes to the heart of the biased development of the canon. It is a fact that some of our finest and earliest American poems—which even now remain invisible as part of the lyric poetry tradition—were produced by anonymous enslaved African Americans, an uncomfortable idea which may precisely explain their exclusion from the highest echelons of literary regard. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in the Preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, “The white people among whom the slaves lived did not originate anything comparable even to the mere titles of the Spirituals.”6 The spirituals are a record of an oppressed people’s ability to surmount inconceivable inhumanity, and as such, are a reminder of the ongoing impact of that cruel and inescapable legacy. That is part of their message and identity, while their literary value as inspirational texts transcends their origins to serve as a universal testimonial to human fortitude. They contain the properties and effects of literariness that are found in commonly shared definitions, including Aristotle’s dictum in Poetics 22 that literary language should be both familiar and strange. Like the greatest works of literature, the spirituals foreground aesthetic uses of language as creative material or substance, formally organize ideas and emotions emphasizing lexical and stylistic patterns, employ ineffable effects and interpretations beyond the denotative level of meaning, feature techniques and devices that intentionally exploit the polysemous and multi-layered properties of language, emphasize sonic dimensions of language’s inherent musicality, and use auditory and/or visual operations and techniques for purposes of differentiation from functional utilitarian communication.
In an illuminating comparison of the poems of David Drake (Dave the Potter) and George Moses Horton, Faith Barrett develops a cogent and illuminating argument that both poets relied on experimental techniques of layering to simultaneously convey their competency in the formal standards of the “white elite” and establish their self-positions in a stature of critique (Barrett 2018). Although Barrett does not address the spirituals, this argument can be usefully extended to that body of contemporaneous literary expressions similarly freighted with the task of slipping past captors and overseers without causing alarm or suspicion and yet expressing self-efficacy, self-determinacy, and subjectivity. The comparison of Horton and Drake helps point out the frequently overlooked but key dimension of the spirituals that reinforces their difference from early figures such as Drake, Horton, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: the spirituals are transcriptions. We have received the songs as cultural artifacts through the mediation of auditors, interpreters, and transcribers who essentially functioned in the roles of translators and scribes. These are not the writings of the enslaved poets who created them: they are oral products that have been transformed into written language with “normalized” spelling and other editorial incursions. The widespread antebellum legal prohibition of African American literacy, and the culturally tolerated abhorrence of the idea of educated African Americans, including after Emancipation and well into the Jim Crow twentieth century, formed the foundation for African Americans to turn inventively to diverse mechanisms to preserve and share their words and ideas.
Like life in a war zone, enslavement must have been a combination of the soul-crushing boredom of repetitive tasks and the constant threat of violence and violation, including, at the slave-owners’ whim, sudden relocations to other plantations and often the separation of families. These conditions are represented in the spirituals, which reflect that experience thematically and structurally and were as portable and transportable as the enslaved peoples’ lives. Yet these products, expressing an unpredictable and transmutable communal experience forged from creatively interchangeable components, have been passed along misleadingly as static texts. We can experience the collections of spirituals as versions or interpretations but must remember that their earliest preservation by their creators was in oral form, not in print. We find “translations” and approximations of vernacular diction which reflect the fascination of the early transcribers who recognized that the spirituals were unique materials that were important to preserve while recognizing the difficulties of faithful representation. In these “versions” of the oral poems, we also encounter the limited auditory, technical, and experiential capabilities of the early transcribers to reproduce what they were hearing; that uncertainty is acknowledged directly in a number of sources, including Higginson and Allen, Ware, and Garrison.7 Our literary analysis and apparatus must incorporate direct acknowledgement that we are at a mediated remove from the spirituals’ authors, and have less ability to determine their intents and meanings than poets like Drake, Horton, and Wheatley who wrote their own words. The critical tradition has a long history of judging and defining the African American poetry canon based on print publications and supplanting the necessary primacy of oral products with textual versions.
The spirituals serve as an omnipresent source of allusions in African American and world literature. Because references to spirituals tend to be indirect, allusion becomes a salient trope in this case. Allusion, the intentional but indirect evocation of one work by another, is an ancient and basic literary property and defines the process that makes a classic. The lasting works of literature are those that other authors incorporate and comment on in their own new writing, which proves the continuing meaning of the earlier works and keeps them alive. Robert Alter provides this baseline explanation: “Allusion occurs when a writer, recognizing the general necessity of making literary work by building on the foundations of antecedent literature, deliberately exploits this predicament in explicitly activating an earlier text as part of the new system of meaning and aesthetic value of his own text” (Alter 1989, p. 111). The reader is meant to recognize the allusion through prior familiarity with the text being alluded to and to consider the possible relationships that might exist between the two texts. Since allusions are meant to be recognized through a reader’s own efforts and prior knowledge of the text being cited, their use presupposes the existence of a canon, a shared body of texts that are familiar