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While Gerard Manley Hopkins—a supporter of British imperialism who did not engage with issues surrounding colonialism, slavery, or race—might seem a surprising model for post-colonial writers, he has in fact generated powerful responses in Caribbean poets through his playful rhythmic sensibility, attunement to individuality, religious faith, and environmental consciousness. For John Figueroa, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Pamela Mordecai, John Robert Lee, Jane King, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes, and Vladimir Lucien, Hopkins has been an important example of linguistic resistance. His authenticity of voice, even when it comes from a distant land and culture, has inspired writers whose voices have often been marginalized; his attention to linguistic variation has stimulated experiments with patterns and intonations of Caribbean Anglophone dialects; and his idiosyncratic descriptions of the material world have given Caribbean writers an example of how to capture the uniqueness of their own vibrant landscapes.

What is the relation between two of the most significant areas of twentieth-century literary achievement, namely modernism and postcolonial poetry? How does postcolonial poetry converge with and diverge from modernism? How do postcolonial poems understand their relation to modernism? And what literary historical models are most productive for mapping their relationship? To approach these questions, this chapter alternates between two vantage points: it explores the relation between postcolonial poetry and modernism both intrinsically, from within self-theorizing poems by Karen Press, Lorna Goodison, and Daljit Nagra, and extrinsically, from the higher altitude of conceptual paradigms for global literary circulation under modernity. That is, it closely examines poems that thematize the relation between postcolonial poetry and modernism, and it reconsiders the global analytic models that can schematize that relationship. It tests the models of diffusionism, writing back, singular modernity, and indigenization against the poetry. It argues that postcolonial metamodernist works—poems that reflect on their modernist inheritances—are especially helpful in probing this relationship, one of the most important for understanding modern and contemporary poetry in a global frame.

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 chapter examines the issues of modernist bricolage and postcolonial hybridity in relation to poetic transnationalism. It discusses Third World poets' use of intercultural poetic forms of modernism in their quest to break through monologic lyricism, to express their cross-cultural experience, despite vast their differences in ethnicity and geography, politics and history, from the Western modernists. This also analyzes the relevant works of Lorna Goodison, Kamau Brathwaite and Agha Shahid Ali.