Keith Leonard's Fettered Genius furnishes a fresh perspective on the function and importance of traditional literary genius for African American formalist poets. Leonard is particularly astute when exploring the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as showing how the crusading zeal for assimilation shared by a coterie of Harlem Renaissance writers functioned to rebut racial notions of difference and, paradoxically, to celebrate a distinctive racial experience as vital material for poetry.

Leonard's most compelling research indicates how the progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and Robert Hayden are imbued with the same radical ambivalence about cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. Leonard's key strength, especially in his chapter on the “Modernist Heroism” of Gwendolyn Brooks, lies in his eloquent opposition to theorists of African American culture who operate under the mandate that Fahamisha Patricia Brown, whose seminal Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture, tends to stress the specificity of a culture rather than its dizzying hybridity. Leonard's stringent literary-historical approach deplores the glaring insufficiencies of the traditional oppositional terms of identity politics in African American cultural studies, while also exposing an absolutist tendency which shapes influential studies of African American poetry, such as Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission of African American Poetry, which treats the use of formalist culture as the severe attenuation of the African American self rather than as its hybrid reconstruction or adaptation. Similarly, Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References implies that the power of African American poetry lies almost exclusively in a given poem's manipulation of black speech patterns and black music, suggesting that a formalist poetic is not authentically “black.”

Leonard's book is thus a timely and trenchant alternative to the scholarship based on affirming the vernacular tradition in African American literature, work which offers only at best partial, or at worst haughtily dismissive interpretation of the role and value of a hybrid poetic cadence. Like Aldon Lynn Nielsen in Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism, Leonard recognizes that the formal character of literature and the African American oral voice are not closed and opposed systems of meaning. Fettered Genius is a bracing antidote to those books on African American poetics that rely too heavily upon identifying the political consciousness of individual poets in terms of how fully they endorse African American vernacular culture. Leonard dismantles false boundaries of “authenticity,” providing more sophisticated and rigorous terms for evaluating the sheer technical expertise and antiracist verve of formalist poetics.