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Through case studies of Scottish, English, and "Black Atlantic" poetries from the landmark modernist year of 1922 through the mid 1970s,
Nations of Nothing But Poetry looks to answer what happens when poets combine vernacular language with the spirit of modernity.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Vernacular Discourse from Major to Minor
- Chapter 2 The Impossibility of Synthetic Scots; or,
- Hugh MacDiarmid's Nationalist Internationalism
- Chapter 3 A Dialect Written in the Spelling of the Capital:
- Basil Bunting Goes Home
- Chapter 4 Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent:
- T. S. Eliot versus E. K. Brathwaite
- Chapter 5 Transnational Anthems and the Ship of State:
- Harryette Mullen, Melvin B. Tolson and the
- Politics of Afro-Modernism
- Epilogue Denationalizing Mina Loy
About the author
Matthew Hart is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Summary
Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language to re-imagine the relations between people, their languages, and the communities in which they live?
Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s. With a combination of fresh insights and attentive close readings, Matthew Hart presents a new theory of a "synthetic vernacular"-writing that explores the aesthetic and ideological tensions within modernism's dual commitments to the local and the global. The result is an invigorating contribution to the field of transnational modernist studies. Chapters focus on a mixture of canonical and non-canonical writers, combining new literary histories--such as the story of how Melvin B. Tolson, while a resident of Oklahoma, was appointed Poet Laureate of Liberia--with analyses of poems by Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot.
More broadly, the book reveals how the language of modernist poetry was shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of a world in which the nation-state continued to be a primary mediator of cultural and political identity, even as its authority was challenged as never before. Through deft juxtaposition, Hart develops a new interpretation of modernist poetry in English-one that disrupts the critical opposition between nationalism and the transnational, paving the way for a political history of modernist cosmopolitanism.
Additional text
Hart writes with clarity and authority, and he connects his chapters effectively. Although Nations of Nothing but Poetry presents a sustained and unified argument, each chapter is also cohesive enough to be consulted individually...The time and financing that fostered Hart's research and writing has paid off in his fine book, which is likely to guide the terms of debate in important new criticism.
