SOURCE: "'Neath Sheltering Vines and Stately Palms: The Radical Vision of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper" and "The Dialectics of Dialect Poetry: Frances Harper's Sketches of Southern Life," in Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, Wayne State University Press, 1994, pp. 56-78, 147-166.

Boyd is a poet, a professor, and a scholar of African-American studies. Her book, Discarded Legacy, is a historical study of Harper's life and works. In the following excerpt from this work, Boyd offers a thematic and stylistic survey of Harper's verse in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects and Sketches of Southern Life.

      "Ethiopia"
"Let bronze be brought to Egypt, let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God."
Psalm 68:31 

One month after Frances Harper delivered her first lecture on behalf of the antislavery cause, her second book of poetry and essays, Poems and Miscellaneous Subjects, was published by...