A Transnational Poetics (review)

The past decade has seen an increased awareness of how transnationalism both intervenes in and creates new modes of aesthetic and cultural artistic production. In particular, multi-ethnic literary studies are more attuned to the global flows of culture, peoples, and histories that sensitize multi-ethnic US literatures to the material and aesthetic dimensions of migration, movement, and transnationalism. Jahan Ramazani’s study of twentieth-century poetry is among the first to consider modernity’s interactions with globalization by focusing exclusively on works of poetry. Transnational Poetics sets in motion a complex debate about why poetry has so often fallen out of the provenance of transnational studies. The work asks a fundamental question about the epistemology of transnational cultural production: might there be a way for us to consider poets “citizens of imaginative webs formed by cross-national reading and writing” (48), in the wake of increasingly porous cultural borders? Ramazani reminds us that poetry is often considered less capable of circulating transnationally than other forms of cultural work such as film, television, and digital media. In T. S. Eliot’s words, poetry has long been considered by many “‘stubbornly national,’” and as W. H. Auden noted, poetry is often seen as “the most provincial of arts” (Ramazani 3). Ramazani challenges this mode of organizing poetry in purely national terms and he suggests that the borders of the nation-state do not always circumscribe poetry. To the contrary, poetry in the twentieth and twent-first centuries has created a global aesthetic imaginary in which multiple worlds converge.

The subjects of Ramazani’s study are wide-ranging, and the malleable framework moves transnationalism beyond the contemporary moment to consider how modernist poetics can also be sensitive to the vagaries of migration and movement. Transnational Poetics examines the works of Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Langston Hughes alongside works by Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Walcott, and numerous other postcolonial, ethnic American, and black British poets. The juxtaposition of “stubbornly national” national poets with more recognizably postnational or transnational poets reveals how modern and contemporary poetry spills across nationally defined borders to redefine the nature and scope of national literary paradigms. By reading across national and cultural contexts, Transnational Poetics deprovincializes the study of poetry, in the terms Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, in order to resituate poetry’s dynamism in responding to and shaping the contours of transnationalism.

The first half of the book focuses on modernist as well as more contemporary western poetry from North America and the British Isles; the second half turns to postcolonial poetry by South Asian, African, Caribbean, and black British authors. The first two chapters lay out the theoretical scope of the project. Chapter One analyzes globalization’s impact on poetry and the pedagogic function performed by poetry vis-à-vis globalization, while Chapter Two delves into the formal effects of transnational literary influence on poetry. Chapter Three focuses on the formal qualities in the poetry of imaginative travel, considering works by Frank O’Hara alongside Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and others. The fourth chapter considers how North American and British poetry of grief and mourning, in particular the form of the elegy, might be less nationally bound than previously thought. Within circuits of public culture, grief is often defined in explicitly national terms. For instance, one mourns the body of the fallen American or British soldier, thus suggesting that forms of mourning are often indelibly grafted onto particular forms of nationalism. But Ramazani argues that the elegy during times of war often reaches across national lines to create networks of affect and care that refuse to adhere to the borders of nation-states. Ramazani notes that even Wilfred Owen’s elegies, often understood as among the most nationally inflected exemplars of the genre, are richly layered and less myopically focused on the nation than heretofore conceived. Chapters Five through Seven examine postcolonial poets’ responses to the cultural influence of British and North American modernist poetry while also considering the ways in which the ruptures produced...