A Transnational Poetics

"America is my country," remarked Gertrude Stein, only to fracture this apparently nationalist claim by adding, "and Paris is my home town" (61). Stein's translocal claim of identity—splaying herself between the spectral context of one nation and the lived metropolis of another—accords with the transnational affiliations and identities of many other modern and contemporary poets, though she is often absorbed into nationalist narratives of "American" literature. Studies in cultural transnationalism have recently proliferated in a variety of humanistic subfields, but in studies of modern and contemporary poetry in English, single-nation genealogies remain surprisingly entrenched: an army of anthologies, job descriptions, library catalogs, books, articles, and annotations reterritorializes the cross-national mobility and migrancy of modern and contemporary poetry under the banner of the single-nation norm. If Stein were an exception among twentieth-century poets, this disciplinary paradigm—which goes back to Johann Gottfried von Herder's pre-Romantic concept of literature as an expression of national identity and rigidifies in the Cold War American academy—could surely accommodate her; after all, humanistic disciplines must draw artificial boundaries to delimit their object of study—nation, language, period, genre, and such—and so must allow for anomalies. But the "exceptions" to mononational narratives—modern "American," "British," "Irish" poetry—are so abundant that they should spur a reconsideration of the conceptual structure that continues to govern much critical production in the field. Globe-traversing influences, energies, and resistances—far from being minor deviations from nation-based fundamentals—have arguably styled and shaped poetry in English from the modernist era to the present.

Although literary scholarship is not a branch of the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services, as the INS has recently been renamed, critics co-construct the national and ethnic identities of writer-citizens, routinely issuing passports to T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, W. H. Auden, Denise Levertov, and Sylvia Plath, for example, in the shape of footnotes, literary histories, and anthologies that claim them as "American" or "British." Because these national labels are made to serve disciplinary, ideological, and pedagogical functions, they often blur the distinction encapsulated by globalization theorist Etienne Balibar between "ethnos, the 'people' as an imagined community of membership and filiation, and demos, the 'people' as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights" (76). While literature, as Benedict Anderson shows in his 1983 book of the same name, helps fashion "imagined community," or ethnos, poets, novelists, playwrights, and readers also confound the boundaries of national and regional community, forging alliances of style and sensibility across vast distances of geography, history, and culture.

How would modern and contemporary poetry studies in English—an area now largely subdivided along national lines—look if this transnationalism were taken to be primary rather than incidental? How might the field seem different if the nationalities and ethnicities of poets and poems, often reified by nation-based histories, anthologies, and syllabi, were genuinely regarded as hybrid, interstitial, and fluid imaginative constructs, not "natural, real, eternal, stable, and static units" (xiii-xiv) in Werner Sollors's phrase? And what are the methodological and even political implications of reshaping a humanistic subdiscipline to reflect the intercultural energies and mobilities of cross-national literary citizenship? Although a full remapping of modern and contemporary poetry in English is beyond the scope of this essay, my hope is that an inevitably synoptic and scattershot redescription of it, highlighting moments of transnational citizenship, exchange, and influence, can help advance the field beyond theoretical and piecemeal acknowledgment of this cross-culturalism to a more thoroughgoing internationalization of its disciplinary practices.

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The main reasons why mononational constructions of modern and contemporary poetry do not suffice should be obvious. That many of the key modernists were expatriates and exiles, transients and émigrés, is well known and frequently rehearsed; yet, the implications for nation-based literary histories have not been fully absorbed within institutions of literary instruction, dissemination, and criticism, which remain largely nation-centric. Further, the modernists translated their frequent geographic displacement and...