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Sugar and Slavery in the West Indian Georgic

James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane is the first major poem from the Anglophone Caribbean, and the first poem written in the region before the 20th century to claim a place in the canon of “English literature” in the conventional sense of the term. This in itself makes it a significant work of art, and that Grainger, a Scotsman, is the “Father” of Caribbean Literature makes his work ever more intriguing. Widely reviewed on the first appearance in 1764, it received particularly high praise from Samuel Johnson in the Critical Review, and from the Parisian Gazette Littéraire de L’Europe. Over the next seventy years, it was reprinted in England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States and the Caribbean, often in collections of standard works of English poetry, and extracts still appear in anthologies of 18th-century literature. Grainger’s poem is particularly striking for its skilful use of the traditional georgic form to emphasise the importance to British commerce and imperial power of the Caribbean colonies which then produced enormous wealth from sugar. The poem includes vivid descriptions of the natural world and the cultivated landscape in the Caribbean, and Grainger frankly acknowledges the central importance of slavery in the production of sugar. While Grainger (who had married into the planter class in the island of St. Kitts and owned slaves himself) endeavours to present slavery in the best possible light and gives advice on the choice and treatment of slaves with a cool detachment, he insists on the humanity of the slaves and shows at least some awareness of the brutality involved in the slave trade. Written at a time when “polite literature” emphasised the importance of adhering to a conventional poetic diction, The Sugar-Cane is not only a georgic but also avowedly “a WestIndia georgic.” Grainger uses “terms of art” (i.e., technical terms) peculiar to the sugar industry and defends this in his preface as necessary, even if they “look awkward in poetry.” (We may recall that Johnson condemned even Milton for “his unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art.”) Grainger may call the peacock “Juno’s bird,” but he calls the humming-bird a humming-bird. Among the conventional poeticisms of naiads and dryads for streams and woods, we find Caribbean plants and animals which are called by their common names—in defiance of Joseph Addison’s injunction in a famous “Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” first published in 1697 and quoted by Grainger in a review of Dyer, that “nothing which is a Phrase or Saying in common talk should be admitted into a serious Poem.” Grainger had been rebuked by Smollett for using neologisms in his translation of Tibullus, and even as successful a writer as Thomson could be criticised by Somervile for using vocabulary from beyond the boundaries of conventional poetic diction. Grainger himself certainly subscribed to the prevailing idea that the proper language for poetry was the language of the London literary public—so when we find him introducing yams, okras and bonavist into his georgic, there is more than “novelty” to it; there is an artistic boldness which should not be underestimated. It is clear he had come to some understanding of the idea that a poem about the Caribbean could not be written in a manner that was entirely European.