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Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge is best known today as the author of The Life and Adventures of Joaqu ın Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), a historical romance sometimes identified as the first major work of American Indian-authored fiction. Comparatively little attention has been paid to Ridge’s poetic output, even though the available evidence suggests that, prior even to his experiments with the prose romance, Ridge may have been the first American Indian author to publish lyric poetry. Indeed, the lyric genre was a lifelong preoccupation of Ridge’s, as can be seen through an analysis of two poems, “My Harp” (1848) and “The Harp of Broken Strings” (1850). In these two works, poetry itself, figured through the apostrophized harp or lyre (the etymological source of “lyric”), is celebrated as a means of establishing a bond of deferred solidarity between a socially outcast poet and an indefinitely large community of readers. The two poems accomplish this end in strikingly different ways. The first, composed in highly regimented tetrameters, defies and even insults its readers as a means of reveling in its own poetic virtuosity. The later poem, composed in liltingly irregular stanzas, envisions poetry as a form of therapeutic reflection capable of transmuting historical and interpersonal traumas into an utterance that is both beautiful and true. The rhetorical and formal heterogeneity of Ridge’s “harp” lyrics testifies to the author’s embeddedness in a history of exile and dislocation that forced Ridge (like many others caught up in the removals and dislocations that shaped Southeastern Native life in the Jacksonian era) to radically reimagine, at various times in his life, the opportunities for political, personal, and literary self-determination available in his world. At the same time, for all the differences between the two poems, Ridge’s turn and return to the lyric suggests that working in that genre provided him a measure of stability amid the vicissitudes of his lived historical experience. Writing lyric poetry gave Ridge one way of insisting that he was in control of his fate even when political, personal, and indeed literary circumstances seemed to suggest otherwise. Ridge’s harp poems are highly conventional and hence

Lyric X-Marks: Genre and Self-Determination in the Harp Poems of John Rollin Ridge