poetry,” writes Bruce Lincoln, “which the Enlightenment disparaged as a form of primitive irrationality, had been re-theorized under the signs of authenticity, tradition, and national identity.”87 What was trampled upon by the Enlightenment became something like buried treasure for romantics, and every effort was made to excavate and preserve such precious relics. Romantic artists thus hunted for these folk treasures in an effort to shore up cultural nationalism: James MacPherson (1736–1796) published poetry that was purported to be the ancient voice of the Scots; epics like the Nibelungenlied, Kalevala, El Cid, and Chanson de Roland were released as testaments to the greatness of their respective cultures; and later, as the twentieth century arrived, many poets and modernists turned to the cultural reserves of their national traditions. Yeats turned to Celtic legends and myths, Miguel Ángel Asturias looked to Mayan myths, Alejo Carpentier recovered Afro-Latin religions, Gerard Manley Hopkins focused on the Anglo-Saxon vernacular, Lorca celebrated Spanish ballads and “deep song,” Du Bois turned to black spirituals, and the list goes on. Recall in this vein James Joyce’s definition of his literary purpose: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”88
For the romantics, the “uncreated conscience” of each unique culture was at stake in the war with the defilers of soul. Though their dispute with the Enlightenment was unmistakably modern and new, we can also trace the issues involved here back to the ancient Greeks. As early as Heraclitus and Plato, poets were often slighted by philosophers, such as when Heraclitus heaped scorn on the hoi polloi (common people) for their intellectual shortcomings and affection for poetry: “What understanding or intellect have they? They trust in poets of the common people and treat the mob as their teacher, not knowing that ‘the masses are bad, the good are few.’”89 And Plato followed the basic outline of this model, thinking that mythoi and music appealed to the basest part of the human soul (the emotions more than reason) and to the baser forms of humanity, like women, children, and the lower classes.90 If he conceded the value of poetry, myth, and music, it was largely for those who were unable to follow the subtleties of philosophical argumentation or, more interestingly, on occasions when philosophical certainty could not be established, such as in the fate of the soul after death or on the nature of the gods. (This is obvious in The Timaeus, in which he resorts to myth to make sense of the creation of the universe.)
Whatever the case, it is clear that the romantics wanted to recover the Greek poets (Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians) more than the philosophers and to disturb the hierarchical privileging of prose over poetry, logos over mythos, analytical reason over eros, theory over music, and propositional argumentation over narrative. They were challenging the disembodiment of language from oral inflections, rhythms, and timbres, and they were challenging the rupture and bifurcation of language and music, reason and emotion, form and content, and theory and practice. By reuniting these dimensions—a search for the other half in this dualism, in the manner of the myth of Aristophanes in the Symposium—they would nurse the fractured soul back to health, restore humanity’s original nature, and return people to a time when wordsmiths were singers and mythmakers, rhymers, and signifying poets.
Du Bois’s deeply felt identification with the folk songs and spirituals of African Americans can be seen as a note in this larger cultural score. In choosing to adopt Herder’s popular understanding of folk-soul, he placed his work in the romantic context of Sturm und Drang: “So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul.”91 Here Du Bois clearly catches the wave of romanticism’s emotional unrest and turmoil—storm and stress—but he also gives it a distinct meaning, fraught with the stress of being black in America. Rocked on all sides by violent waters, he says, the black soul is torn in two and unreconciled, striving, on the one hand, for participation in America, and on the other, for the preservation of African identity in a nation that smells of burning black flesh.92 Besides implying that one can belong to two different Volkgeists, an African and an Anglo-American (a significant point itself), the most striking element of these ruminations has to be the glaring portrait of the psychic torment and physical rupture of black lives. Du Bois’s reflections on black soul are always close to a threnody, dirge, or jeremiad, and they translate the raw forms of racism and terrorism into the idioms of high culture, converting the screams and sobs of slave ships, auction blocks, and cotton fields into the stuff of literature. Similar to the way the writers of the American Renaissance sourced and refined native preaching styles in the nineteenth century, Du Bois transformed the popular sentiments and idioms of black America into a more polished literary art.93 This is nowhere more evident than in his powerful analysis of the “sorrow songs” of Afro-America; it is in their melodies, born of the dust of toil, he remarked, that the soul finds its most articulate and exuberant expression.
Du Bois considered the spirituals—“the rhythmic cry of the slave”—the most beautiful expression of human experience born on this side of the sea.94 For him, these folk songs were eloquent proof that slaves had an undeniable capacity for grandeur in ideas and emotions. They were evidence of artistic genius among the oppressed and despised in America, proof of black folks’ deep well of spirituality, their hidden springs of magnanimity. Sometimes muted and weary, then ecstatic and effervescent, sometimes broken with trouble but still dogged in hope, they were almost always live wires of emotion that burned through pain and despair. With pitches and pulses that caused the mercury of the soul to rise to its summit, this musical folk poetry poured over the listener in tides of emotion, spilling light and harmony into a world of darkness and dissonance, breathing grace and fire into every nook and cranny of the soul. Where blacks had to “roll through an unfriendly world,” Du Bois saw these songs as something like the crooning of a mother’s alto voice: “Mary, don’t you moan, don’t you weep.”95
As many writers have noted (Albert Raboteau, James Cone, Eddie Glaude, and others), Du Bois may have overstated the otherworldly emphasis of the spirituals (claiming that they could be religiously fatalist and escapist), but he saw with great insight their aesthetic value, that they were fundamentally ennobling of black dignity and transformed the Babel of suffering into a liturgy of song, dance, and ecstasy.96 Like a religious incantation and ritual, these canticles beseeched God with body and soul, wail and moan, complaint and supplication, and gave the human spirit a chance to catch the Holy Ghost, to be seized and baptized by fire. Whatever else would happen, for Du Bois this music was a tangible example—in contradiction to the Enlightenment’s disdain for the masses—of the rich poetry of the humble slaves, the embodiment of their most primal instincts, desires, affections, fears, dreams, and hopes.97
The key to Du Bois’s analysis of black folk-soul is the simple yet radical claim that these cultural liturgies were the equal of any other artistic achievement in Europe or elsewhere. On this point he followed Herder’s refusal to rank the Volkgeist of various nations. (Terry Eagleton refers to Herder, accordingly, as the father of cultural studies.)98 In contrast to some other German thinkers, including Heinrich von Treitschke, a teacher of Du Bois in Berlin, Herder championed a tolerant cultural and linguistic pluralism, without any presumption of cultural inferiority on the part of these national spiritualities; for Herder, cultural differences were incommensurable, not tiered.99 He viewed cultural and linguistic variety as something like a great orchestra of humanity, with each culture contributing different sounds and instruments, each gifted and worthy of a seat in this ensemble of musicians, none better than the other.
In spite of Herder’s pluralistic vision, however, the concept of soul was later desecrated by the German Nazis, South African Afrikaners, and other racist regimes of the twentieth century. In their hands, as George Fredrickson has demonstrated, folk-soul became indistinguishable from an obsession with the purity of bloodlines and thus was synonymous with a version of cultural identity cleansed of all foreign contaminants.100 Used as an ideological ruse in the battle with all “inferior” races and cultures, folk-soul was increasingly stained by fantasies of racial
