Global Anglophone Poetry ― Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, De Kok, and Nagra

Engaging key debates in world literature, Omaar Hena examines how prominent poets renovate the long poetic tradition, from Homer to Seamus Heaney, to engage local, political crises and the sweeping pressures of globalization. The formal resources of poetry, for Hena, furnish the aesthetic means for critiquing urgent social inequalities facing the postcolonial world and minorities in the Global North. At the same time, he demonstrates how it is by virtue of working within canonical forms that world poets gain international recognition and prestige. Looking to writers as diverse Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Ingrid de Kok, and Daljit Nagra and others, Hena combines a close attention to the nuances of literary form with an analysis of the national contexts and the wider divisions of the global literary marketplace shaping contemporary poetic production. Ultimately, this book renews the relevance of poetry to create more robust models of worldly belonging suited to the complexities of our new, and historically familiar, global realities.

Omaar Hena is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. His publications have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Minnesota Review, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, A Companion to Modernist Poetry, and The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry.