Etheridge Knight and Shane McCrae: A Comparison of the Theme of Poetry as a Means to Freedom from Imprisonment in Two African American Poets

Abstract

Abstract This thesis will compare two contemporary African American poets, Etheridge Knight and Shane McCrae, and compare their respective treatments of the question: can poetry provide freedom from imprisonment? We attempt to answer this question by demonstrating: how each poet uses poetry to describe imprisonment from a different perspective; how each poet focuses on certain aspects of imprisonment; and how each poet’s work may or may not be a liberating force against the prisons they describe. We examine how racism and white supremacy in America factor into the nature of the prison for these poets. We look at Knight’s Poems from Prison (1968) which provides a realistic view of prison life in the 1960s and McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor (2017) which fictionalizes the historical persona of Ota Benga, who was a Mbuti man imprisoned in a cage with orangutans and put on display at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. We argue that, for these poets, and in these works, poetry provides only limited liberation from imprisonment.