The Stateswoman-Poet

Abstract: With some rueful irony, this essay defines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as a stateswoman-poet: an impossible variation on the statesmen-poets who appeared periodically throughout Mediterranean antiquity, the European Renaissance, and the age of revolutions. I argue that in her poetic work, Harper performed otherwise inaccessible forms of sovereignty, against the hard limits on Black women’s political participation in the nineteenth century. In particular, I focus on Harper’s 1871 volume Poems , which expresses a complex political ambition at a moment of extraordinary political opportunity. I find in the stateswoman-poetics of Poems senses of occasion, power, and judgment that would become generative for later forms of Black radical aesthetic-political practice. Through elegies for abolitionist men and allegories of biblical women, the collection responds to the tantalizing possibilities and agonizing disappointments of Radical Reconstruction. I also emphasize how Harper’s thwarted status as stateswoman-poet speaks to the present, not least the Kamala Harris’s failed campaign for the US presidency.