Twentieth-century scholarship typically provides rationales and vocabulary for separating literature by nation, ethnicity,
and period. As scholars begin to study Romanticism
as an Atlantic-rim phenomenon, it becomes logical to replace
Romanticism with
transatlantic romanticisms, the lowercase
r and the added
s indicating the pluralism of the period’s literary and cultural productions. When considered from a transatlantic perspective,
the capital
R of “Romanticism” fragments into seven
Rs, which overlap to give the period more of an ideological grounding:
Race, Reason,
Reflexivity,
Reform,
Religion,
Representation,
and Revolution.
1 Accounting for race
, particularly the slave trade, during an age of colonialism is a necessary but complex endeavor. Writers of the time sought
to justify as well as protest and eradicate slavery as they crossed national, physical, and mental borders in thought, word,
and action. These cultural and national border crossings transform “Romanticism” into transnational movements concerned with
human rights, the self, beauty, Nature, divinity, imagination, and transcendence.
Many transatlantic romantic texts represent the “Imagination” metaphorically by a ship’s transoceanic voyage, movement from
one opinion or position to its polar opposite across an interstitial body of water. Such texts exemplify “Imag-I-Nation(s),”
a term that denotes how writers embroider the representation of self to achieve reform through metaphors that cross waters,
realms, nations, and borders (both physical and imagined). In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772–1834) critiques opposites through the image of the ship’s voyage, a metaphor of “Imag-I-Nation(s),” to develop
a theology and philosophy of unity. His predecessor Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–84) exemplifies in a much less celebrated way
the ability of “Imag-I-Nation(s)” to unify opposites in the face of racist, ethnocentric notions of African-Americans.
Her poetry anticipates the central quandary of “Romanticism
”: the coexistence of one and many.
2 My term “Imag-I-Nation(s)” is a nod towards Homi K. Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” and Paul Giles’s “transatlantic imaginary, by
which [he] mean[s] the interiorization of a literal or metaphorical Atlantic world in all its expansive dimensions.”
3 This term can be further explained with reference to “
Reflexivity,” an important aspect of “Imag-I-Nation(s)” addressed in the third section of this chapter: the self-conscious intrusion
of the
I (of the author and reader) through meta-textual moments in which the text addresses the reader directly or indirectly, usually
by means of an interpretive community or interpreter within the text who mirrors the reader’s act of reading. Meanings are
created through this pact between writer and interpreter.
These interpretive communities act metaphorically as vessels, “reader-ships
,” that carry readers across the gulf of contrary opinions. Paul Gilroy emphasizes the importance of literal and metaphorical
ships for “black Atlantic” writers and seeks to take his readers on a parallel critical journey, using nautical metaphors
and images to travel across dualities that divide the study of literatures and cultures.
4 Ships carrying books, fabrics, spices, rum, cotton, sugar, and other goods crisscrossed the Atlantic docking in ports in
the Americas, Africa
, Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, Greenland, and Iceland. Additionally and importantly, these vessels conveyed people
and their cultures, transplanting them and their mores into new lands to create multicultural contexts. My term “Imag-I-nation(s)”
encompasses the ways identity is modified and maintained across the Atlantic by preserving as well as modifying cultural practices
and yoking opposites. Gilroy provides a discourse that allows for comparison, while acknowledging the importance of race and
gender theory as well as of post-structuralism, without falling into the hierarchical priorities that tend to govern influence
studies.
Like Gilroy, Marcus Rediker reframes scholarly discussion of slavery
by moving it from land to the decks of transatlantic vessels in
The Slave Ship; the Atlantic is also central to Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s
The Many-Headed Hydra.
5 But the imaginative representation of ships in transatlantic romanticisms has received little attention. Neither of Rediker’s
books mentions Wheatley; although Gilroy’s
Black Atlantic mentions her only in passing, his argument does open up routes for discussing her poetry. Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from
Africa to America,” for example, takes readers on a journey across the Atlantic in which crossing the Middle Passage involves
movement between opposites: freedom and slavery. The Atlantic is an interstitial space between opposites (her freedom in Africa,
slavery in the
Americas) that links and, at the same time, reverses them. Wheatley crosses the Atlantic for the first time while being carried
into bondage across the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean and then to Boston. She later journeys across the Atlantic
again to travel to England to have her book of poems published and then to return to eventual freedom from servitude to the
Wheatley family. The Atlantic is an ideological space that repeatedly redefines her identity and the oppositional logic that
sought to limit it.
This chapter does not seek to establish Wheatley’s influence on Coleridge, but rather to suggest a framework that reveals
the unexamined interplay among their works and those of other Atlantic-rim writers. “Transatlantic romanticisms” include the
diversity of rhetorical forms and traditions without trying to rank them hierarchically or appropriate them into “Romanticism”
and involve the examination
of alternative narratives of influence, confluence, and difference, where Wheatley occupies a much more central role. Such
comparison opens up:
1. how the concept of the “imagination” is used by transatlantic romantic writers to navigate the space between writer and reader, self and the divine, cognition
and emotion, as well as other Enlightenment opposites;
2. how the “Atlantic” comes to represent, for these authors and their readers, an interstitial space and entity that allows the
critique of binaries by linking opposite sides of the ocean, unifying seemingly separate ideas, people, countries, and cultures;
3. how transatlantic romantic writers utilize the metaphor of the ship to represent the imagination as the vessel that moves
reader and writer from one belief to its polar opposite, from one (nation) state (of mind) to the other, with the metaphor
of the voyage representing the imagination’s ability to travel the space between notions and nations that are deemed separate
or opposed in order to ultimately destabilize, invert, subvert, and deconstruct oppressive theologies and ideologies such
as slavery;
4. how “Imag-I-Nation(s),” “transatlantic romanticisms,” and Gilroy’s notions of the “black Atlantic” and “ships” redefine “Romanticism” by acknowledging and linking Atlantic theologies, literatures, and cultures that curricula, canons,
and scholarship have ignored or defined as separate, opposed, subordinate, independent, inferior, superior, or mutually exclusive
to one another.
The writings of early Afro-Caribbeans, Black British, Afro-Canadians, and African-Americans constitute a major yet comparatively
unexamined
contribution to the theology of the period. The transatlantic revivalism of Wesley and Whitefield’s Great Awakening is central
to what might be characterized as “black Atlantic” theology. Exegesis, hermeneutics, and biblical reference and allusion are
key to understanding Wheatley’s conversion of Wesley and Whitefield’s Great Awakening (beginning in the 1730s) into a radical
liberation theology that destabilized pro-slavery Christianity through techniques that could anachronistically be described
as deconstructive. Pro-slavery Christianity attempted to transform a religion
originated and practiced by dark-skinned people to one that justified their oppression and enslavement by relocating the
religion geographically, removing it from its middle-eastern roots and ties to “Abyssinia” and making it an American/Western
(or European-American) religion; by inaccurately depicting Jesus as a white European, dark skin as the “Mark of Cain,” and
Africans as “descendants of Ham”; by justifying slavery through the false equation of indentured servitude in ancient Israel
with plantation slavery; and by not allowing slaves and free blacks to learn to read the Bible, attend church, or gather for
Bible study on the grounds that slaves and free African-Americans do not have souls.
Prominent abolitionists and writers such as Wheatley explained the role that Whitefield played in their conversions. Communities
in Louisiana and Catholic colonies in the Caribbean mixed Catholicism and practices of “conjure magic”; Anna Brickhouse examines
these cultural intersections and the “French Caribbeanization” of Wheatley’s poetry, appearing in translation in
Revue des Colonies.
6 Other writers of the “black Atlantic,” such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and John Marrant,
mixed Protestant and tribal beliefs. The Christianity of these writers is not only fused with beliefs held by their ancestral
tribes in Africa, but also with a liberation theology that explicitly links the Jewish and African diasporas as well as slaves
in the Caribbean and Americas with the Israelites themselves, who were delivered from bondage in Egypt. Exodus in the Torah
and the Passion narratives of the New Testament’s synoptic gospels had a special significance for those seeking freedom from
the systematic oppression of laws, governments, economics, and the cultures of nations whose Christianity buttressed racial
supremacy. Afrocentric Great Awakenings took Enlightenment Anglo-American revivalism’s notion of human rights many steps further,
modifying even Whitefield’s allowances for slavery (in his campaigning for its legalization in Georgia), despite his then
uncommon belief that African-Americans had souls, spiritual agency, and membership among the saved. Interdisciplinary scholarly
work remains to be done on these Great Awakenings and revivals of religion into a radical theology that continues to play
a
role in upholding civil liberties for the marginalized in the “black Atlantic” world.
Wheatley is no “pagan suckled in a creed outworn.” She uses an Afrocentric liberation theology, hidden in the language of
classical poetry’s anthropomorphic and personified nature and in Greek and Roman gods, to critique the Anglocentrism of the
Great Awakening and the hypocrisy of pro-slavery Christians. The double-voiced reversal in the first line of “On Being Brought
from Africa to America” is her reference to Africa as a “Pagan land.” Although this seems to agree with Eurocentric assessments of the continent, the descriptor “Pagan” subtly links Africa with the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome, which were lionized in British and American neoclassical
verse, as well as in American democracy. Whenever Wheatley uses double-voiced reversals, such as the double meaning of “Pagan,” to undercut religious-based racism, she is participating in “black Atlantic” liberation theology. Consider, for instance,
the following lines:
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
7
The punctuation makes “Christians,” and “Negroes” interchangeable to allow for another reading that critiques pro-slavery theology and reverses racist color coding: the slave-holding
“Christians” are “diabolic” and may be refined to join African-Americans like Wheatley who will be saved as part of the “angelic train.”
If the “black Atlantic” contribution to theology has been marginalized, so, too, has “the suggestion that cultural historians
could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce
an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”
8 The critical separation of Black British, African-American, Afro-European, and Afro-Caribbean from each other (to name only
some complex “black Atlantic” identities and writing), as well as from other Atlantic and American cultures, perpetuates the
oppositions that underwrote the Enlightenment colonialism and modern imperialism that many writers of the time sought to destabilize.
Gilroy has argued that the “history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability
of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade.”
9 As he suggests, the Atlantic figures prominently in the identity of writers of the African diaspora whose works exemplify
double consciousness. By both
critiquing and participating in Anglo-American culture, Wheatley’s writing exemplifies what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called
“double consciousness,” a term defined and inextricably linked to theology and race in W. E. B. Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk. Combining Du Bois’s term and Gilroy’s application of it with what Bhabha terms cultural “hybridity” leads to the conclusion
that writers of the “black Atlantic” did not just have double consciousness, but more complex identities composed of multiple
transnation
al consciousnesses: “Imag-I-Nation(s).”
It is a subtle legacy of early Enlightenment binary thinking that literary critics have struggled to understand these seemingly
disparate aspects of Wheatley’s identity by viewing it only in relation to an Africa
n-American tradition and placing her on a continuum of African-American and/or women poets. When her contemporaries discussed
Wheatley’s poetry in relation to white poets, their comparisons perpetuated neoclassicist, Eurocentric, and androcentric views
and judged her poetry a bad imitation of male eighteenth-century poets. Few scholars have discussed Wheatley in relation to
Romantic poets. They too have classified her as an eighteenth-century Enlightenment or African-American poet. Paul Giles,
who interprets Wheatley in a multicultural context, rightly notes that she “cited Pope as her conscious model, and, like the
Twickenham poet, manipulated her style of imitation to carve out for herself a rhetorical persona, an imagined or projected
narrative self.”
10“On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To His Excellency General Washington,” “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield,”
and “A Farewell to America. To Mrs. S. W.” triangulate America, Britain, and Africa, associating all three with Wheatley’s
identity as a woman, a Christian, a poet, a theologian, and an abolitionist. Her poetry exemplifies “Imag-I-nation(s)” by
linking the I of self with the continents of America and Africa, the nation of the United States and liberation theology, and by declaring her identity as an African-American woman created in God’s
image. In her poem “On Imagination,” she makes the act of composing poetry an echo of the divine act of creation:
Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’unbounded soul.
(lines 13–22)
This description of the imagination includes a subversion of the rhetoric of colonialism and slavery. The ocean crossed here
is one of time and space that links the material to the spiritual. Like the Atlantic’s Middle Passage, the crossing of this
ocean leads to the sight of “new worlds”; however, the journeyers carried there are not chained, but “unbounded” souls.
Wheatley’s poem becomes the ark that transports readers high above earthly dualities to a place where they can “in one view…grasp
the mighty whole.” The poem’s linkage of the Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s Ark, and the rainbow’s arc joins transcendental to
empirical aspects of the Atlantic crossing. Imagination is represented as “pinions” that lift the starship of verse, “Soaring
through air to find the bright abode, / Th’empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.” Thus, “Imagination” replaces Enlightenment
“reason” as the faculty capable of bringing humans divine insight. From imagination’s interstellar perspective, the binary
divisions of racism are shown to be insignificant before the unity of saved souls. As a black woman, Wheatley’s identity is
conscribed by national laws that deny her equality with property-owning white males; in Leigh Gilmore’s terms, Wheatley’s
identity, as defined by transatlantic crossings, is characterized by interruption and deferral.
11 The slave trade depended upon the universality of duality in all Atlantic ports, but Wheatley shows that souls are liberated
on the universal harbors of “new worlds.” Her trans-galactic voyage of emancipation parallels her earthly journey into bondage,
while opposing the universality of dualisms of imagination and fancy, black and white, freedom and slavery, saved and damned.
Her representation of imagination as the liberating force, and fancy as the enslaving force anticipates William Blake’s more
celebrated “mind-forg’d manacles” (1789):
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.
(lines 9–12)
The content of the verse illustrates the ways in which it is freighted with subversion yet cloaked in the conventions of eighteenth-century
neoclassical versification.
In “On Imagination” and “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” Wheatley utilizes John Dryden’s neoclassical poetics for
abolitionist
politics. Dryden’s “A Defense of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy” endowed reason with humanity and citizenship by referring to
it as a “free-born subject, not a slave” – adding that “[f]ancy and reason go hand in hand,” the latter preventing the former
from crossing too wide a gulf of opinion.
12 Wheatley’s imagination
not only leaps across gulfs of opinion in a single bound, but also “can surpass the wind, / And leave the rolling universe
behind.” Where Dryden’s reason is personified as a “free-born subject” who can ultimately temper and control imagination and
fancy, Wheatley’s “Imagination” is an “imperial queen” with control over “free-born subject[s].” By contrasting “slave” to
“free-born subject,” Dryden’s poetics tacitly acknowledges slavery as a separate and legitimate category and allows for the
possibility of reason being “misled, or blinded.” However, Wheatley’s poetics employs images of slavery to advocate abolition:
the “soft captivity” of fancy in the poem takes the reader “across the gulf” to emancipation, where “new worlds amaze th’unbounded
soul.”
Wheatley’s rhyming couplets may not seem very “Romantic” (although Romantic-period verse does take this form) but an ode on
imagination in pentameter does bring the work squarely in line with canonical Romantic poems. Her praise of “Imagination”
as a ship of transcendence anticipates Coleridgean understanding of the term as well as that of American transcendentalism.
Although Wheatley asks, “Imagination! who can sing thy force?” she shows that she can sing imagination’s force and makes herself
coequal with the “imperial queen.” But this song of herself as imagination incarnate (words made flesh) is quickly undercut
by the rhetorical maneuver of identifying herself with the opposite – fancy:
I reluctant leave the pleasing views
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.
(lines 48–53)
Wheatley’s verse corresponds to Jeffrey Robinson’s definition of “Fancy” as a “counter-poetics” with the capacity to reverse
aristocratic aesthetics and ethics: “winged” and “sportive” and thus difficult to “fetter.”
13 Her use of opposites to critique binary logic anticipates Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”:
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
Both poets write imaginative verse about their seeming inability to compose poetry of imagination. But the self-conscious intrusion of the writer into the text, and the likening of the self to the national and local as
well as to the transnational and cosmic, both testify to the powers of imagination and exemplify the transnational reach of
“Imag-I-nation(s).”
One of the many links between Wheatley’s and Coleridge’s poetry, to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie, is that they “will
not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost…[but] create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible
ones, imaginary homelands.”
15 They are connected beyond periodization, classification by nation, discipline, and race. Metaphor, particularly the Atlantic
as metaphor, is essential to “Imag-I-Nation(s)” because it yokes two separate, perhaps even seemingly mutually exclusive or
opposite things, entities, or ideas, enabling the metaphorical self to become the link between the lost self and the present
self; between the country or place of origin and the countries or states of mind, exile, or travel; between the physical and
the spiritual and the micro- and macrocosmic. For writers whose identity is multicultural, the self becomes politicized in
works which depict journeys through borderlands and boundary waters of “Imag-I-Nation(s)”: “Living on the borders and in margins,”
writes Gloria Anzaldúa of being raised at the intersection of “Mexican” and “Anglo” cultures, “keeping intact one’s shifting
and multiple identity and integrity is like trying to swim in a new element, an ‘alien’ element.”
16 In transatlantic romantic texts and beyond, “self” and “nation” are inextricably linked to each other as well as to the transcendence
of these terms in the notion of home.
The journey from one opinion to its opposite, as represented by the voyage of a ship across the Atlantic, also critiques opposites.
Coleridge’s “Rime” and Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reveal words and beliefs to be, like vessels,
not permanently anchored, but in flux, free-floating between opposing definitions. Wheatley’s endowing the imagination with
this power is crucial to her ability to draw it, in Dryden’s terms, “headlong into a persuasion of those things which are
most remote from probability” – to a time when slaves will “break their iron bands” and be restored as equal parts of “the
mighty whole.” Her identification of “Imagination” as primary and omnipotent also anticipates Coleridge’s famous affirmation
in
Biographia Literaria of “the infinite I AM [/WE
ARE].” Like Wheatley, Coleridge uses the middle-eastern logic of biblical hermeneutics to unify aspects separated by the binary
coding of western logic.
One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient
distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”)
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a narrative about journeys of self and nation
: the story of “one’s ship coming in” as well as the “ship of state” unified through the metaphor of transoceanic voyage.
Seamus Perry argues that it documents the central and recurring theme of the poet’s thought – the coexistence of plurality
and “the One Life” – and that “on the voyage to Malta, Coleridge himself came to think about the poem as a prophetic self-portrait.”
17 Coleridge saw it as a spiritual
autobiography: the 1798–1800 versions document movement from his father’s Trinitarian Anglicanism towards the Unitarianism
of his Cambridge tutor, William Frend. The 1815–16 marginal notes reflect the imbrication of his nautical, religious journey
with the evolution of his Romantic poetics: on April 9, 1804 he sailed for Malta on the
Speedwell with a five-book version of
The Prelude, which portrays the evolution of Wordsworth’s radical pantheism and its trajectory towards Anglicanism. Coleridge noting
that his voyage to Malta was prophesied in his poem’s account of the travels of the “Old Navigator” leads to an important
discovery: Coleridge’s Maltese odyssey is as theologically formative as the mariner’s ship-board voyage. In Malta in 1805,
he rejected Unitarianism as idolatry and, a little over a year later, he spent Holy Week at St. Peter’s Basilica. Given his
Anglican and Unitarian roots and routes and clearly anti-Catholic poetics – most notable in the superstitious papal doctrine
espoused by the unreliable “Jesuitical” narrators of the “Rime” and
Christabel – Coleridge spending Holy Week in Rome is as theologically consistent as a man who carelessly killed an animal then preaching
the necessity of loving all things great and small.
18 Did the mariner’s learning to accept the coexistence of unity and plurality in “The Rime” map Coleridge’s own theological
voyage towards reconciling Unitarianism, Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, the abolitionist elements of Thomas
Clarkson’s writings on the Society of
Friends, and the revolution
ary humanitarianism of Wordsworth’s pantheism? The theological vocabulary of the poem is evidence of its religious pluralism
– the Catholicism of “Mary Queen,” the pantheism of “Polar Spirit” (in the marginal gloss to lines 397–401), the “kirk” of
Presbyterianism – as is the hermit, heretically connected to the Cathedral of Nature, whose pew is a “rotted old oak-stump”
with a moss kneeler, but who is able to administer the Catholic sacrament of confession.
Robert Penn Warren has argued that “The Rime” is a narrative of the “One Life” and the imagination
’s “sacramental unity.”
19 But Anne Williams holds that the
Mariner’s dreamlike tale, though told and heard, is virtually nonsensical, almost failing to mesh with the structures that
impart meaning to experience. But only such a tale could represent the semiotic – a series of disjointed, emotionally charged
images evoking the eye’s oceanic voyage toward the I-land of self consciousness.
20
The poem recounts a journey from separation (“with my cross-bow / I shot the
ALBATROSS!”) to togetherness (“He prayeth best who loveth best / All things both great and small”) and thus contains equal evidence
for either interpretation (lines 81–82, 618–19). “I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography,”
Coleridge wrote on May 28, 1798 to his friend Joseph Cottle, the
Lyrical Ballads’ typesetter and publisher.
21 Coleridge did, however, write Cottle a poem on the topic – “The Rime.” The journey of the imagination between opposites is
symbolized by hyphens, which represent ships
traveling between opposites, such as “
LIFE-IN-DEATH.” Theologically speaking, the most important hyphen is the one that yokes “cross-bow” (present in the 1817 version of the
poem) to connect the merciful god of the covenant of the “cross” with the wrathful god of the covenant of the “(rain)bow,”
thus bridging “Old” and “New” testaments, Judaism and Christianity. Like Wheatley’s “On Imagination,” “The Rime” also links
the Ark of the Covenant, the nautical voyage of Noah’s Ark, and the rainbow’s arc. Coleridge’s typographical symbols, the
metaphors in the poem, and the poem as a metaphor are vessels to carry readers across the gulf of contrary opinions: “reader-ships.”
Critics note that the ship’s journey across the Atlantic mirrors the Middle Passage of a slave ship. The poem was written
after Coleridge’s Bristol anti-slavery lecture, so abolition and religion
were more than likely foremost in his mind at the time of the poem’s composition. Opinion is divided as to whether the mariner
is shrived for his participation in slavery and
guiltless, or whether he remains guilty and unredeemed.
22 The either/or logic of these critical disagreements ultimately reinforces the duality that Coleridge is seeking to address
and redress. There is as much evidence indicating that the mariner is saved as there is to prove he is damned. A Venn diagram
of his state would show that he inhabits the common space between these extremes, and that his journey and penance are not
complete at the poem’s close. According to Catholic doctrine, penance requires contrition, confession, satisfaction, and absolution.
Although the mariner begs the hermit, “shrieve me, holy man,” there is no evidence that the mariner is shrieved. The hermit
merely asks in reply: “What manner of man art thou?” and the mariner begins his tale or confession. Despite the mariner’s
confession and contrition, there is no evidence of his satisfaction (in either Jesuitical or Jaggerian senses), let alone
of his absolution. The “softer voice” has it right: “The man hath penance done. / And penance more will do.” Coleridge declared
“The Rime” a “poem of pure imagination,”
23 and “Imag-I-Nation(s)” provides a way to link the opposed critical views. The imagination’s transoceanic voyage between opposites
(east and west, north and south, slavery and abolition) intersects with cyclical processes such as the rising and setting
sun that undo the absolutism of polar duality. Dualism is critiqued by the notion of travel between opposite hemispheres:
traveling west will eventually bring one east; rounding the South Pole eventually takes the mariner north again.
The logic of the poem makes its reader “one of three” who has been stopped and “cannot chuse but hear” or read the story.
Active reading requires setting sail, so to speak, with the mariner; and the text is narrated in such a way as to impress
the reader, in more senses than one. Within the text, as an interpretive community trying to make moral sense of the mariner’s
shooting of the albatross, the crew mirrors the poem’s readers. For both, a decision about the mariner’s guilt or guiltlessness
becomes an acknowledgement of complicity: the very act of judging, according to the biblical decree, brings down judgment.
Like the troupe of spirits that inhabit the crew’s bodies, readers are meant to imagine themselves as being in the same boat
as the mariner so that, through an act of sympathetic reading, they can become (possessed by) the ancient mariner or a member
of his crew. The reader is also represented, of course, by the wedding guest whose voyage of listening/interpretation moves
from indignation, to fear, to sympathy, to a self-reflexivity that suspends his disbelief (“of sense forlorn”) and makes him
a “sadder and a wiser man.”
What moral might be applied to the readership of the
Lyrical Ballads? Coleridge was inspired by the beliefs of Thomas Clarkson, who had
published his
Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788) a decade before the
Ballads were printed. English editions of the
Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802, and 1805) were contemporary with William Wilberforce’s agitations leading up to the passage of the Slave
Trade Act in 1807. The anti-slavery moral of the poem found a favorable readership among American Quakers, who purchased the
1802 Philadelphia edition of the poems. Coleridge’s aim in writing the “Rime” was to take the reader out to sea, and to convert
him or her, through “imagination,” to a “poetic faith” that would make abolition a moral mandate:
It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as
to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
24
Like the subject of the first verb of Wheatley’s final couplet in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” – “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train” – the poem’s double-voicedness is such that its most radical claims are left
unstated, but are nevertheless understood. As Colleen Glenney Boggs’s chapter in this volume makes clear, reading mirrors
nation-building and citizenship, and Wheatley’s poem appeals to its American readership. The London publication of her Poems also indicates how reading her poetry transcends the national to buttress transatlantic abolitionism. Wheatley implicitly
puts the “Cross” back in Atlantic crossing by drawing a parallel between her slavery and subsequent manumission to become
a voice for the oppressed, and the suffering and subsequent rebirth of Christ on the cross. Wheatley’s taking the reader on
an Atlantic crossing has spiritual connotations of the evangelist who saves the reader, through a baptism in which one is
born(e) again by water. The poem’s journey is marked by a gulf between its first and last four lines, in which the tone of
the poem shifts from what seems to be a poem written by a grateful slave to a forceful statement against “Some” whose ideology
supports the systematized racism of slavery. The “Some” are directly addressed as readers who are commanded: they become the
subject of the imperative verb – “[You] Remember” – and are told to recall Christ’s message of love. The commas after “Christians, Negroes, black as Cain” make the items on this list interchangeable. Racist notions are reversed, and it becomes her “Christian” white readership
who are in need of refinement.
Coleridge’s nautical journey to Malta was as theologically formative as Wheatley’s trips across the Atlantic, and the significance
of these journeys is reflected in each writer’s poetry. During their symbolic, nautical journeys, “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” and “On Being Brought from Africa
to America” ask readers to willingly suspend belief in custom-sanctioned cruelty and to place their faith in the redemptive
capabilities of the imagination. Both poems reflect the emotional logic of transatlantic Puritan conversion narratives, in
which “a profession of repentance, above and beyond the profession of faith, was the distinguishing factor that made a conversion
narrative personally felt and experiential, rather than merely objective.”
25 Coleridge’s “Rime” provides a universalist version of this edict; “On Being Brought” professes a repentance that is just
as readily the reader’s as the poet’s and the syntax of the poem makes it clear that the racist “some,” rather than African-Americans,
are those who need to be “refin’d.” These poems use the journey of “Imag-I-Nation(s)” to invoke unity through love. The paradox
of the poems’ rendering of imagination lies in their capacity to critique the earthly duality of custom and replace it with
an “empyreal” binary of universal love and redemption from evil, while training “sadder and wiser” readers who “may be refin’d”
in the political practices of this life.
A similar logic informs many black Atlantic autobiographies in the image of “the talking book” that enters into spiritual and reformative dialogue with the reader. This logic is also built into the frame narratives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the reader is made the final recipient of Walton’s letters and is imaginatively brought to the most far-flung reaches
of ambition and egotistical sublimity, to be confronted with the choice between continuing to voyage alone or returning with
the crew. In the words of Wordsworth, these works are indices of readers’ minds “forever voyaging on…seas of thought” together
and/or “alone.” The reforming nautical voyage links the transatlantic romanticisms of Mary Shelley, Wheatley, and Coleridge
with, for example, Joel Barlow’s Columbiad; Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; John Marrant’s sermon preached on June 24, 1789 to the “African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons
in Boston”; Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca”; Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”; Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”; White-Jacket; Typee; and Moby Dick; Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; and Walt Whitman’s “Aboard at a Ship’s Helm” and “Song for All Seas.” All use ships as potent images of the transformative,
transferential power of “Imag-I-nation(s).”