Apostrophe, Animation, and Racism

This chapter emphasizes apostrophe, the Romantic figure of address that has been so central to modern lyric theory, in the work of Plato's fellow American Romantics John Pierpont, Frederick Douglass, James Monroe Whitfield, and George Moses Horton. The chapter examines how apostrophe created fictions of both speaker and addressee. Such fictions may appear benign or even world-making, but in apostrophic poetic address (such as “Mneme, begin”), the absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is therefore made present, animate, and anthropomorphic. The chapter defines apostrophe as a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness. For Black poets in the nineteenth century, such interpellation felt—for good reason—like erasure rather than expression. As Black poets wrote poems that foregrounded the hazards of interpellation that Romantic apostrophe posed, poems that often took the figure of apostrophe itself as their subject, the chapter underlines that they signified on the process of lyricization as it was unfolding, changing the direction of that process by making it metalyrical from the beginning.