Albery Allson Whitman

Whitman, Albery Allson (1851–1901), poet and minister. The “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” was born to slave parents in Hart County, Kentucky. Although he lived in bondage for twelve years and had only one year of schooling, Albery Allson Whitman published five volumes of poetry, and both his art and his living gave substance to his motto: “Adversity is the school of heroism, endurance the majesty of man, and hope the torch of high aspirations.” Orphaned at the age of twelve, Whitman labored on the farm of his birth; then, from 1864 to 1870, in Ohio and Kentucky, he worked in a plough shop, in railroad construction, and as a schoolteacher. He briefly studied under Bishop Daniel A. Payne at Wilberforce University (1871) and later served as general financial agent of Wilberforce. Although never formally ordained, in 1877 Whitman was pastor of an AME church in Springfield, Ohio, and from 1879 to 1883 he established churches and led congregations in Ohio, Kansas, Texas, and Georgia. During these years, critics and other poets highly praised Whitman's poetry. He died of pneumonia at his Atlanta home.

“Poetry,” Whitman wrote, “is the language of universal sentiment…. Her voice is the voice of Eternity dwelling in all great souls. Her aims are the inducements of heaven, and her triumphs the survival of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good.” Whitman's art is not utilitarian or polemical but rather art for art's sake and for the sake of showing the race's creative talent. He wrote full-blown Romantic poetry, looking back to legendary pastoral worlds (marred by race prejudice); seeing the present as a sphere of unlimited human potentiality; and looking forward to an ideal earth perfected by human love and poetic genius. Whitman tried to emulate the century's great Romantic poets but never had the opportunity to develop their disciplined craftsmanship. Much of his poetry is technically weak and diffuse, marred by careless versification, awkward shifts in diction, overblown rhetoric, and homiletic digressions. Nevertheless, Whitman did supremely well with what he had: a sure dramatic sense; talent for suspenseful narration, romantic description, communication of pathos, irony, and lovers' emotions; a catholic range of subjects; and the courage to employ varied and difficult meters and rhyme schemes in epic-length poems, suiting his music to shifting moods and meanings. To these poetic skills Whitman added a sense of honor, strong race pride, and sensitive perception of universal issues, poignantly personalized. His code of “manliness” challenges the African American man to fight for “place and power!”: “The manly voice of freedom bids him rise, / And shake himself before Philistine eyes!” (The Rape of Florida, 1884).

The breadth of Whitman's interests are apparent in his long poems. Leelah Misled (1873), in 118 stanzas, is a tale of seduction and betrayal; but the poem dwells on man's distortion of nature's laws; the transience of human joy; virtue and sin; the state of Georgia; excellence in women; time; and comparative religions. Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877), in 197 pages contrasts brave Indians, joined by a few rustics and the mulatto hero, Rodney, with treacherous “civilized” white men, as Rodney journeys from slavery to freedom. The Rape of Florida, reprinted as Twasinta's Seminoles (1885), through 251 Spenserian stanzas rehearses events of the Seminole Wars (1816–1842); but the treacherous “rape” exemplifies the superiority of primeval nature over the world of “Mammon”; of fierce-spirited red and black braves over white men; and of love—of God and among natives—over the hatreds and hypocrisies of the church, state, and army. Whitman's finest lyrics lie within such long poems: “Come now, my love, the moon is on the lake; / Upon the waters is my light canoe;” (The Rape of Florida).

Whitman dared to be an innovator and a “fearless manly man” in his poetry. His considerable achievements place him in the first rank of contemporary African American and white poets.

Bibliography

• Albery A. Whitman, prefaces to Leelah Misled, 1873; Not a Man, and Yet a Man, 1877; The Rape of Florida, 1884; Twasinta's Seminoles, 1885.
• Carl L. Marshall, “Two Protest Poems by Albery A. Whitman,” CLA Journal 19 (Sept. 1975): 50–56.
• Blydon Jackson, “Albery Allson Whitman in DLB, vol. 50, American Writers before the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Trudier Harris, 1986, pp. 263–267.
• Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1, 1989.
• Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed., 1989

Joan R. Sherman