This is an academic text. As a fan of Black American poetry, I was interested in learning more about abolitionist poets. The author draws heavily from other scholars whose works center around Black American life pre and post Civil War. As I read this book, I didn’t get a clear idea of the author’s thoughts on this important subject matter. It felt like a regurgitation of the other scholars’ works. This book works best as a starting point for finding research and the names of some 19th century Black American poets.

I really enjoyed this book. It perfectly exemplifies art as a political act. This book also provides a really great foundation to understanding at an insidious level of the erasure that cultural appropriation of art can cause. As a sucker for flowy prose let me tell you the prose here is velvety in such way that is perfectly balanced to the topics being discussed.

An amazing window into the minds of black folks after enslavement. I feel like I got not only a thorough academically researched into the creativity of Black people during a crucial time in history but a window into the mind of the author of this book and how our ancestors influence us today.

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.

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!

This book was not at all what I had expected, but I think that’s down to my not reading the synopsis carefully enough. In saying that I found this to be a really interesting read, and almost brought me back to my days of analysing texts for an English assignment (in a good way!)
I will say also that I think this book is for a very specific audience, but I would still encourage everyone to branch out and give this a go!

Anyone else finish this book and feel completely obsessed with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Albery Allson Whitman? Because I doooo.

This is very much an academic book written for an academic audience and is narrow in scope, focusing on a handful of Black writers of the era. **This is not a book of poetry.** It is a study of Black poetry and music toward the end of slavery in the US and how the style of European Romanticism influenced or was exhibited by specific writers.

Even though this book is short page-wise, this is not a light right be any means and took a long time for me to get through in comparison to fiction of the same length. That's just how it is when I read a scholarly work, especially a scholarly work about a topic I'm not well versed in, so I expected that going in.

That said, reading this closely and in small chunks was worth the effort and I found this book extremely rewarding. I learned a lot about Black poets around the end of slavery, and I'm excited to explore the works of those mentioned in this book further.

For me, the book started out a little rough, the first chapter about Black Romanticism and Byron was difficult for me to get through. Then shit blew up! My favorite chapters are 3 - the Seething Brain, and 4 - The Uprising of Women.

The analysis in the Uprising of Women fucking KILLED me. I stayed up reading until 2am and was screaming in excitement as I read to my partner who had to tell me to CALM DOWN. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper writes about capitalism, labor, slavery, and drew "attention to the human labor 'congealed' in everyday objects, as Marx would have it over a decade later in Capital, Vol. 1 (1867)." READ THAT SENTENCE AGAIN. My head exploded.

Learning about Harper's writing on labor, capitalism, and slavery was my favorite takeaway from the book. Compared to Marx, "From her different vantage on the Atlantic world-system, Harper imagines an aesthetic reversal of commodity fetishism via Free Produce, making obvious rather than obscuring the brutality that went into producing her food and clothes." ... Harper's writing critiques "slavery as an economic institution." I need someone to write an entire book about this aspect of Harper's writing ASAP, because I'm fascinated. I need more of Harper's Black feminism in my life.

I also really like how the author does line-by-line breakdowns and analyses of the poems and songs referenced. I would read the poem or song, have my own interpretation, and then get taken to school by the author (happily!). Sandler's expertise really shone through for me in these instances (it's also crystal clear throughout, tbh). I loved learning about the influences, references, and the background/context of the texts that I never would have known about without reading this.

It's clear this book was a labor of love by an incredibly intelligent and passionate poetry scholar. It's an incredible work of scholarship!

Thanks to #NetGalley and Verso Books for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I promise nobody told me to say this, so this is just a tip from me to you: Verso always publishes great stuff, so I recommend checking them out if you haven't before (or lately).

I DNF'd this book at 25%. I thought (and was led to believe) that this book was a poetry collection. I assumed it would progress through the times of black poets. I was so incredibly wrong. This is an academic text. Dull, dry, boring. It is incredibly interesting. I would love to finish this book. However, it is not a book that I can read cover to cover. This is a book I read a page at a time. I will be star rating this book based on how I was feeling as I read what I read. I will be finishing this book, but it could take several months for me to get through.

I need to start off by saying this is a fairly dense, academic read, and I learned so much! The Abolitionist era is definitely a gap in my knowledge, my "fixation" is mostly on the Reconstruction South. What you have in this book is the juxtaposition of writings by Black Romantics, and then context around it. I'm going to be honest, I have a hard time reveiwing nonfiction books. But the narrative and voice, while academic, flows well. It definitely takes a bit to work your way through but given the state of the world right now, as a Black American I recommend this for context on a little-known corner of history! Four stars because this is one of the first books I've seen on this subject, with so much information. Not five stars because it was very dense and at times difficult to work through.

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.

Advanced copy provided courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.