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This chapter argues that poetry is vibrantly dialogic, a quality usually reserved for the novel. It proposes a “dialogic poetics” that would combine analysis of poetry’s interplay with other genres, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of “dialogic,” and genre-specific analysis of poetry as poetry, in Roman Jakobson’s sense of “poetics.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry metabolizes a variety of discursive forms, and this chapter focuses on three: the novel, theory, and the law. Ever since poetry lost its literary preeminence to the novel, it has sought ways both to assimilate, and to differentiate itself from, novelistic realism, plot, and character. Similarly, it has borrowed aspects of theory and philosophy, while showing poetry’s forms, figurations, and visual materiality to diverge from these abstract discourses. It has also recognized itself in the precision and narrative structures of the law, even as it has separated its polyphony and multifariousness from what it sometimes represents as the law’s narrow rationalism, its binary logic. In readings of poets from W. B. Yeats to Christopher Okigbo, NourbeSe Philip, and Lorna Goodison, the chapter traces poetry in the act of defining itself situationally and relationally, as it incorporates, and contends with, other discourses.

This concluding chapter examines issues of ‘beginnings’ in the narrative foundations of the physical environment, and probes its incompatibility with post-colonial intellectual architecture. This is used as a basis for discussing temporal uncoupling, which enables present models to be situated in the past, and vice versa. The chapter uses Christopher Okigbo’s labyrinth as a metaphor for the productive incongruity of the openness to new experience—which is the defining feature of the encounter between classical literature and post-colonialism—and argues that this encounter enables classical and post-colonial to jointly challenge the conventional architecture of historical progress. The chapter’s argument thus generalises out from the impact of the detailed case studies of the first section, and then returns to key examples which are scrutinised through new lenses which are sensitive to the themes of temporal and genre disjunction that emerged in the second part.

The early twentieth century witnessed a kind of renaissance of rhythm theory. Already in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche and others had offered ideas of rhythm that took up, to varying degrees, Presocratic theories of form and flow. By the 1930s, figures such as Paul Valéry and John Dewey were taking this work in striking new directions. Also significant for this period are African theories of rhythm, expressed in the work of figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, and Manuel Rui. Of particular significance, this chapter argues, is the mid-century philological work of Émile Benveniste and the phenomenological account of rhythm articulated by Emmanuel Levinas. In particular, Levinas’s theory of embodied “participation” and aesthetic experience connects to early Greek ideas regarding enrhythment. Henri Meschonnic’s critique of rhythm is also considered, and the chapter concludes with a close reading of Alice Oswald’s partial translation of Homer’s Iliad.