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Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres. Exceptionally wide-ranging in scope yet rigorously focused on particulars, A Transnational Poetics demonstrates how poetic analysis can foster an aesthetically attuned transnational literary criticism that is at the same time alert to modernity’s global condition.
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A T R A N S N AT I O N A L P O E T I C S
A TRANSNATIONAL POETICS * Jahan Ramazani
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
jahan r amazani is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the coeditor of two books, most recently The Twentieth Century and After and volume F of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, eighth edition (2006), and is the author of three books, most recently The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press, 2001). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
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isbn-13: 978- 0-226- 70344-2 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226- 70344-4 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ramazani, Jahan, 1960– A transnational poetics / Jahan Ramazani. p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-70344-2 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-70344-4 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. 3. Literature and globalization. 4. Transnationalism in literature. 5. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. pn1111.r36
2009
809.1'93581—dc22 2008041464 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
For Cyrus & Gabriel
CONTENTS
Preface ix Acknowledgments xv
1
Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization 1
2
A Transnational Poetics 23
3
Traveling Poetry 51
4
Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry of Mourning 71
5
Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity 95
6
Caliban’s Modernities, Postcolonial Poetries 117
7
Poetry and Decolonization 141
8
Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain 163 Notes 181
Index 211
PREFACE
Editing the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, I was reminded of Captain MacMorris’s question in Henry V: “What ish my nation?” Though working on a cosmopolitan anthology, I soon discovered I hadn’t escaped the riddles of national identity. Glossing the phras