"This volume is the first anthology of poetic writings on slavery from America, Britain, and around the Atlantic during the Enlightenment - the crucial period that saw the height of the slave trade but also the origins of the anti-slavery movement. Bringing together more than four hundred poems and excerpts from longer works that were written by more than two hundred and fifty poets, both famous and unknown, the book charts the emergence of slavery as part of the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world. The book includes: poems by forty women, ranging from abolitionists Hannah More and Mary Robinson to Frances Seymour, the Countess of Herford; works by more than twenty African or African American poets, including familiar names (Phillis Wheatley), intriguing figures (Afro-Dutch Latin scholar Johannes Capitein), and newly rediscovered black poets (an anonymous veteran of the Revolutionary War); and poetry by such canonical writers as Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Johnson, Blake, Boswell, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge." "The poems speak of the themes of slavery: capture, torture, endurance, rebellion, thwarted romances, and spiritual longing. They also raise intriguing questions about the contradications between cultural attitudes and public policy of the time. Writers such as these, suggests editor James Basker, were not complicit in the imperial project or indifferent about slavery but actually laid the groundwork for the political changes that would follow."--BOOK JACKET.