Poetry and Bondage

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric – and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

'… monumental …' John Hawke, Australian Book Review, 'capacious, ambitious, judgmental, and obviously valuable.' Stephanie Burt, Critical Inquiry

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.