Taking poetry seriously: abolitionism and the unheroic couplet

What does it mean to write serious poetry, or to take poetry seriously? The abolitionist poet William Cowper was concerned that poetry might never be serious enough for the subject of Atlantic slavery. Yet Cowper also called one of his own abolitionist ballads ‘ludicrous’, and wrote antislavery lyrics in the recognisably light—if not outright comic—form of the anapestic tetrameter couplet, the meter of eighteenth-century social satires and modern children’s verse. This essay takes the micro-history of the eighteenth-century anapestic couplet, especially in its relation to antislavery poetry, as a case study in poetry’s claims to serious thinking. In response to the increasingly commodified, imperially codified heroic couplet, traditionally “light” anapestic lines were reworked as a species of unheroic couplet: a form that confessed to poetry’s limitations and ludicrousness even as it took up the serious moral work of abolition.