"The Poetry of Slavery collects together the most important works of poetry generated by English and North American slavery from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Mixing poetry by the major Anglo-American Romantic poets including Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, and Dickinson with curious and sometimes brilliant verse by a range of now forgotten literary figures, this anthology is designed to aid students and teachers to address slavery's cultural inheritance in Britain and America." "Distinguished by its formal variety, abolition publicity in general, and poetry in particular, drew on new publishing modes which became available during the period. Consequently, the poems come from a publishing base which takes in handbills, broadsides, print satire, song sheet and chap-book songsters, illustrated adult and children's books, children's toys, novels, slave testimony and narrative, and private manuscripts, as well as the expected published volumes of verse. A body of work created on two continents by women and men, blacks and whites, slaves, ex-slaves, and freemen, it is as relevant to the developing memory of slavery now as it was when it was written."--Jacket.