The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery

Thoroughly researched, cogently argued, beautifully written. An urgent reminder of the omnipresence of the past, and a model of what scholarship can be.

I must admit that the last time I read about romanticism was in an SAT passage almost a decade ago. However, the proposition of Matt Sandler’s “The Black Romantic Revolution” seemed almost too good to pass up. After all, Black writers, especially Black writers during America’s Independence War and its bloody aftermath, are often ignored in favor of heavy hitters like Wordsworth or Byron. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed “The Black Romantic Revolution” much more than I expected to.

It’s an entertaining, informative and important historical and cultural analysis of Black history, relating the past work of the Black Romantics like Harper, Horton and Whitman to modern day Black resistance movements. As I read, I began to recognize some of the root ideas in Black feminism, in Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde. Overall, a good read!

To be clear, this is a book about the history of the Black Romantic Revolution poets and does not include a poetry collection. It is a comprehensive history that posits that the Black Romantic Poets laid the groundwork for contemporary Black humanities. It is well researched and written. I am not usually a nonfiction reader and was hoping for more inclusion of poetry to exemplify each chapter, so I rate this a 3 because it reads like an academic text: fascinating, but dry.

This was a fantastic look into the lives, goals, struggles, and successes of Black poets at the end of slavery. This book is thoroughly researched and while dense, shines an academic lens on the creative work of the reconstruction era. I loved reading segments of poetry throughout, though I could have happily read even more and found myself wishing for some to break up the dense text at times! The connections to Marx made throughout the text were also incredibly interesting, and I’ll be examining the ideas in this book for a long time to come.

This is a brilliant and well-written account of how nineteenth-century Black poets created a new means of resistance. Totally recommend.

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