Albery Allson Whitman

Whitman was born into slavery at a farm near Munfordville, Kentucky. After years as a manual laborer, working at a plowshop, on railroad construction and as a teacher, Whitman attended Wilberforce University in 1870. There he studied with Bishop Daniel Payne.{{cite book| chapter= Albery Allson Whitman| title= African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology| url= https://archive.org/details/africanamericanp00joan| url-access= registration|editor = Joan Sherman| publisher = University of Illinois Press | year = 1992| isbn = 9780252062469| pages = [https://archive.org/details/africanamericanp00joan/page/236 236–237]}} Whitman stated that he wrote his 1877 poem "Not a Man and Yet a Man" so that "he might speak more effectively for Wilberforce".Benjamin Griffith Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro, Biblo & Tannen Publishers, 1966, p. 112 His writings made him the most popular African American poet in the Reconstruction era.Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery. New York: Verso, 2020: 155. {{ISBN|978-1-78873-544-5}}

After six months at Wilberforce, Whitman left to become the financial agent for the university and an African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor in Springfield, Ohio. He later took other pastoral positions between 1879 and 1883, leading and establishing churches in Ohio, Georgia, Kansas, and Texas. He died in 1901 of pneumonia.Giemza, Bryan, Lisa Abney, Gail Galloway Adams, Gilbert Allen, Timothy D. Adams, Regina Ammon, Daniel Anderson et al. Southern Writers: A new biographical dictionary. LSU Press, 2006, p. 435.

Whitman had a wife named Caddie and four daughters. The daughters formed the vaudeville troupe The Whitman Sisters, who performed together from 1900 to the 1940s.Erwin Bosman, [http://nodepression.com/article/whitman-sisters-why-we-may-never-silence-them "The Whitman Sisters: Why We May Never Silence Them"], NoDepression.com, September 3, 2012. Retrieved March 8, 2018.

Joan Rita Sherman wrote in African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century of Whitman's poetry as "attempts at full-blown Romantic poetry", emulating the American and British authors from that tradition. Whitman himself acknowledged the inspiration of Lord Byron, writing of "the loftiness of Byron's well-wrought rhyme" as an influence.Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery. New York: Verso, 2020: 50. {{ISBN|978-1-78873-544-5}} Yet Dickson Bruce argues that "Whitman went beyond sentimental ideals in his understanding of literature, and even beyond the ideological directions outlined by [Frederick] Douglass and his colleagues."Bruce, Dickson D., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915, LSU Press, 1992, p. 34.

In 1901, shortly before his death, Whitman published An Idyl of the South: An Epic Poem in Two Parts. The opening four lines suggest high romantic poetry through a sentimental reflection on the South: "Hail land of the palmetto and the pine,/From Blue Ridge Mountain down to Mexic's sea/Sweet with magnolia and cape jassamine,/And thrilled with song, — thou art the land for me!"[http://mypoeticside.com/poets/albery-allson-whitman-poems#ixzz3m6zOfpW7 "Albery Allson Whitman Poems"], My poetic Side.

Albery Whitman's poems are not regularly reprinted in modern anthologies of Black poetry. Benjamin Brawley referred to Whitman as "probably the ablest of the race before Dunbar,"Benjamin Griffith Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal, Biblo & Tannen Publishers, 1966, p. 110. and a recent scholar echoes this view, asserting that Whitman was "one of the most important African American poets between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar and probably the most prolific."{{cite book| title=At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman|first = Albery Allson | last = Whitman| editor-last = Wilson |editor-first= Ivy G. | publisher = Northeastern University Press| year= 2009| isbn = 9781555537074| series = The Northeastern Library of Black Literature Series | page = 4}} Ivy Wilson notes that Whitman employed "multitudinous metrical configurations" and that "he was consumed with the aesthetics of sound. Much of his major volumes read like novels in verse".{{cite book| title=At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman|first = Albery Allson | last = Whitman| editor-last = Wilson |editor-first= Ivy G. | publisher = Northeastern University Press| year= 2009| isbn = 9781555537074| series = The Northeastern Library of Black Literature Series | page = 6}}

• Not a Man, and Yet A Man (1877)
• The Rape of Florida (1884, later republished as Twasinta's Seminoles)
• An Idyl of the South: An Epic Poem in Two Parts (1901)

• {{cite book| title = Albery Allson Whitman (1851–1901): epic poet of African American and Native American self-determination (unpublished dissertation) | first = James R. | last = Hays | publisher = Florida State University| year = 2000 }}
• Mabry, Tyler Grant. "Seizing the laurels: nineteenth-century African American poetic performance" (2011). A new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity [dissertation; unpublished].

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• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Albery Allson Whitman}}
• [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse?key=author;page=browse;value=w Links to the full searchable text of three of his collections] at American Verse Project at the University of Michigan Digital Library

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Category:1901 deaths

Category:1851 births

Category:African-American poets

Category:African Methodist Episcopal Church clergy

Category:Wilberforce University alumni

Category:19th-century American poets

Category:American male poets

Category:People from Hart County, Kentucky

Category:19th-century American male writers

Category:Burials at South-View Cemetery

Category:19th-century American clergy