Frances Harper

I would like to talk about Frances Harper's poetry. You can see a couple of posts down Cathy talks about how much she enjoyed her poetry. We talked about this outside of class and I don't really agree with Cathy. yes Harper's poetry was profound but I think the fact that she was never a slave but she chooses to write about slavery takes away from the strength of the poems. while reading the poems I was struck with the story and all of the emotions that they stirred up but in the back of my head i could not help thinking that this was in fact fiction, that there was no way that Frances Harper experienced this so the writing loses some of its credibility. Cathy compares the writing to that of Sojourner Truth, I agree that the poems are as inspirational as Truth but compared to her "Arn't I a Woman?" speech Harper's poetry lacks a sense of experience.

To assure everyone that Cathy and I don't in fact have these deep conversations on the meaning and tone of poetry we then went on to discuss Victor Sejours reading and we both agreed that the story didn't really remind us of Oedipus Rex.... It reminded us of Star Wars. :D