“Monuments and Racial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry” examines the interanimation between poems and monuments in the nineteenth-century United States. While scholars have extensively discussed the racist and racialized imagery of these physical monuments, considerably less attention has been paid to their supporting literature—the dedication programs, speeches, and, crucially, occasional poems surrounding their unveiling. This panel will focus on textual endeavors to correct encoded, institutional forms of racism and, in so doing, change the meaning of what audiences to memorials “see.”

The panel proceeds chronologically across the nineteenth century and incorporates a diversity of voices: contributors span institutions, academic ranks, and US geography. The speakers and presider are cognizant of the responsible engagement of nineteenth-century literatures, namely the power dynamics that come with studying race. They will work to mitigate the influence of privilege in the session while being open to feedback from individuals and perspectives negatively impacted by systemic inequalities.

The panel presider, Elissa Zellinger, will offer a three-minute introduction of the panel and three speakers, with eighteen minutes for each paper and fifteen minutes for discussion.

We start with Christopher Hanlon’s paper, “The Anti-Monumentalism of ‘Concord Hymn,’” which examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem migrated from the dedication of one monument—the 1835 obelisk on the Concord River commemorating the opening of armed resistance by American colonials—to the stone base of another approximately 100 feet away—the Minuteman Monument by Daniel Chester French, upon whose plinth the first stanza of “Concord Hymn” was engraved at its dedication in 1875. The stanza engraved here contains Emerson’s famous line, “the shot heard round the world,” extracted from a poem that largely elides glorious revolutionary pat to focus on a present defined by forgetting, effectively critiquing the alleged power of monuments to consecrate or instill viable forms of memory. Hanlon reads “Concord Hymn” as a critique of the monumentalization that emerges from Emerson’s views on American slavery during the 1830s and that presages his more explicit abolitionist work during the 1850s.

The next paper questions the poetics of memorialization—in the absence of a monument. Colleen Glenney Boggs’ paper, “I ask no monument, proud and high” asks what does it means to reject (certain kinds of) monument and monumentality? She focuses on the republication, in 1864, of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Bury Me in a Free Land,” and reads its anti-monumentality in the context of the American Civil War. In Harper’s poem, the speaker cannot fully die or truly rest as long as slavery exists, giving new meaning to the Civil War’s trope of a “good death” by correlating slavery as living death. Only with slavery’s end can life and death again become meaningful, a conclusion that relies on soldiers’ actions as well as Harper’s readers: the reprinted poem invokes settings devoid of commemorative structures and yet it validates the sacrifice of the anonymous individual and collective, turning the print audience into witnesses who give meaning to the losses that occurred in the cause of abolition. Ultimately, the poem commemorates sacrifices that are not monumentalized and yet are vital for literal and symbolic liberation.

In our final paper, “‘A Sphinx of Liberty’: The Frederick Douglass Monument as Poetic Battleground,” Robert Arbour considers countermemorial techniques in commemorative exercises. He examines the Frederick Douglass Monument, the first statue commemorating a specific African American, unveiled in a grand ceremony in Rochester, NY in 1899. The white poet Sherman Richardson, a veteran of the Civil War, delivered the final poetic tribute to the statue, which effectively conflated man and monument: God the sculptor frees Douglass’ “likeness” from the crag of slavery, the finished work revealed, strangely, by the “hand of death.” Douglass, both postmortem and as statue, is a racialized “sphinx of liberty,” and Richardson’s efforts encode the monument with a racism aiming to mute Black voices for a reconciliationist memory of the Civil War. Opposing Richardson’s poem, Arbour argues, was the ballad sung by a Black choir as the statue was unveiled. The singers claim Douglass as a “negro man,” eternalizing him and promising that “others in our race” will succeed him. At stake in this poetic battle is not solely the public memory of Douglass, but the self-fashioning voices of postbellum African Americans.

Even in their universalist appeals to egalitarianism and redemption, these nineteenth-century commemorations—textual and visual—trafficked in racist and racialized notions of visuality. As a result, this panel brings needed attention to the racial knowledge produced by both the physical designs and the poetics of memorialization.