Offering a new theory of poetic constraint, this book analyses contributions of bound people to the history of the lyric.

@Published in 1919 when Lewis was only twenty, these early poems give an insight into the author's youthful agnosticism. The poems are written in various metric

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chai

Slaves in chains, toiling on master’s plantation. Beatings, bloodied whips. This is what many of us envision when we think of 19th century African Americans;

For his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art