Slavery, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution were primary forces that shaped African American literary production during the eighteenth century. Slavery was the force that brought most Africans and Europeans into intense personal contact and influenced Africans’ thinking about Western ideas and ideals. Christianity was the message that prompted several Africans to write, modified their beliefs, and highlighted the contrast between what Christians said and the way they often lived and treated enslaved and other Africans. This disjunction was a constant theme in the writings of Africans who acquired this skill in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment fostered racialist and racist thought concerning Africans and encouraged some Europeans to test these ideas by educating Africans and some Africans to dispute these ideas through literary expression. The so-called Age of Revolution fueled secular and not just religious attacks on slavery and Western hypocrisy. It is not always possible to separate African literary expression in Europe and America or even Africa during the eighteenth century because the world at the time was more truly Atlantic than some may currently suppose.

Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England

In 1881, Arnold concluded that, of the century’s poets, ‘Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves’.1 The judgement was a little more surprising then than it seems now, because the reputations of both were if not in eclipse then at least overshadowed. Between 1840 and 1870 it was the fashion, according to John Nichol, to talk of Byron as ‘a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days’ wonder, a poet for “green, unknowing youth”’.2 After Wordsworth died a fund was established to raise a memorial to him, but it was less successful than had been hoped. Macaulay commented that ‘ten years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone’. Arnold tells that story in 1879, in the preface to his selection of Wordsworth’s poems, and it was that volume that did most to re-establish Wordsworth’s reputation.3 There were more hands involved in salvaging Byron’s. In 1870, Alfred Austin published The Poetry of the Period, in which all the century’s poets are compared with Byron and found wanting, and in the same year John Morley brought out his essay on Byron as the poet of the French Revolution in the Fortnightly Review.4 Ten years later, John Nichol published the volume on Byron in Morley’s English Men of Letters series from which I have already quoted. But the first sign that a revival in Byron’s fortunes might be under way came in 1866, when Swinburne published his Selection from the Works of Lord Byron.5