Poetry
Leo's Poetical Works
Egbert Martin (Leo) · 1883
Synopsis
The first collected poems of a young man confined to his bed, who publishes them at twenty-two: Christian meditations in the Victorian manner on change, the frailty of the body, death and the hereafter, written, he said, to bring comfort to the afflicted and light to those who sit in darkness. The subjects remain universal; the critics of the day reproached him for lacking local colour, a reproach the following collection set out to answer.
Context
The collection was printed in London in 1883, at the author's expense, by W. H. and L. Collingridge, in two hundred and twenty-four pages; the poems had first appeared in the newspapers of the colony. Arthur Schomburg included it in 1916 in his bibliography of Black poetry and held its author to be one of the greatest Black poets; others have judged it a pale imitation of Wordsworth and Tennyson. The Caribbean Press, in Georgetown, reissued a selection of his poems in 2010 in a series of Guyanese classics.
Who it is for
A collection of poems in English, out of copyright. The context of sugar-producing British Guiana sheds light on the texts.
Prizes and reception
His work has earned him recognition as the first great poet of Guyana and the first to put its landscape into verse.