Academic Book

White Space, Black Lines: The Racialization of Free Verse Poetry in the Modernist Era (under contract with University of North Carolina Press)

Free verse is poetry by and for white people. Or at least, that is how white editors and critics pitched free verse to readers when it started to come into vogue in the United States in the 1910s. White Space, Black Lines tells the story of how free verse became a weapon wielded by white critics against Black and Indigenous poets in the early twentieth century. These critics defined free verse in textbooks, magazines, and literary anthologies as the formal expression of an emerging white American race, believed to have roots in an imagined Anglo-Saxon past. For Black and Indigenous authors in the modernist era, free verse did not function as a break or an opening, as it seemed to for white poets; it was instead a form of enclosure, used to shore up racial hierarchies within and beyond the world of poetry and poetics.

We have many stories about how and why free verse developed in the early twentieth century, but this story of the racialization of free verse as a white form in the United States has consistently been overlooked and edited out of our literary historical accounts of modernism—especially those accounts that focus on how free verse was promoted in modernist little magazines such as Poetry and Others. This book returns to those little magazines and to their associated anthologies to show that free verse in the modernist era was a racial formation of whiteness and to explore how Black and Indigenous poets navigated this racialization of poetic form. The result is an account of modernist poetics that reckons with the foundational, structural whiteness of the field in order to develop an anti-racist approach to modernist poetry and poetics.