Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (review)

It would be easy to glance through the cast list of this book—Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Melvin Tolson, and Kamau Brathwaite—and to conclude it must be another worthy study recovering unjustly neglected poets at the limits of modernism. Fortunately, Matthew Hart's study is much more interesting than that. By dint of sensitive close reading and astute social positioning, he certainly makes a good case for reading these poets on their own merits, poets able to retune Pound's or Eliot's aesthetic antennae to register minorities and situations usually well out of metropolitan earshot. But Hart's probing of their troubles with a "synthetic vernacular" touches a nerve for Pound and Eliot too, making this study of modernism's outliers actually one with profound implications for the center.

By "vernacular," Hart means language belonging to subgroups of the national demos, language marked by a particular local accent, class inflection, or ethnic twang, language that has not been absorbed into the metropolitan or to Matthew Arnold's idealized state culture. By "synthetic," he means the modernist techniques of fragmentation and assemblage that deterritorialize such particular languages, cutting loose from "roots" or the "authentic" and thereby enabling networks on a transnational scale. Thanks to the profound homology between nation and language, this angle allows Hart to show how choices of diction and structure in a poem express many of their authors' political problems with the national cultures within which they work—MacDiarmid's fury at the English dominance of Scotland, say, or Tolson's discomfort with the fact that black artists were only allowed to play the role of folk primitives within America. The galvanizing effect of the synthetic on the vernacular, on the other hand, expresses the poets' hopes for a different kind of belonging than the nation-state currently allows—Tolson's idea of Liberia as the African American republic or Bunting's regional Northumbria. While these new forms of nationhood are celebrated in poems, they are not simply versified utopias; they are "nations of nothing but poetry" because they are being thought out through the new forms of synthesis invented by modernism. In his reactionary politics, for instance, T. S. Eliot yearned for a return to the kinship of one people in one place and the revival of a European Catholic order. But the centerless, hyperlinked forms of his actual poetry inspire Kamau Brathwaite's political hopes for an archipelagic, multiply-translated Caribbeanness, a cultural network whose lack of nostalgia for roots would enable it to avoid the ethnocentric fantasies of other recently ex-colonial nation-states as well as Eliot's.

Hart is careful to distinguish his "transnational" from the macaronic of Pound, a modernist internationalism to which no one in particular belongs. His midcentury transnationalism runs more on the model of the internet— multiple points of contact between dispersed entities—rather than on that of the spaceship, melding all pasts into a shiny pancultural future. But he is also refreshingly candid about just why his poets' refusal to drown particular speech is so important and so difficult to achieve. The idea of a "synthetic vernacular" is a way of bypassing the mediating work of nationhood between minority groups or regions and the international powers of capital and empire. As a dream of unmediated relations, though, it hooks into several other hopes dear to modernist poets. Formally, it epitomizes the modernist longing for poems in which tiny fragment and totality freely co-construct the other into unframable forms (as opposed to genre-limited ones), forms like the Cantos or The Waste Land whose elements are irreducible to parts of a whole or means to an end. In cultural terms, it catches Bunting's wish that a rooted tribal folk music and his own well-read globetrotting would naturally coalesce, or MacDiarmid's faith that the Scottish laboring classes would be the natural ally of the noncoercive order of the...