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This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.

This chapter examines how postcolonial poetry responds to the technology, alienation and other features of global modernity. It compares this response to those of the more canonically modernist poetries of the Euro-American metropole and of the Harlem Renaissance. This chapter describes the shared alienation and mutually ambivalent response to the shock and creative potential of modernity on the part of canonical modernists by both the Harlem Renaissance and postcolonial poets.

In homage to the long fellowship between poetry and song, modern and contemporary writers often title their poems “songs.” This book examines how they make use of song lyrics and song forms, quote songs extensively, and even envy song’s collective performance and what Roland Barthes called the singer’s vocal grain. Poetry infuses itself with rock and roll, opera, the blues, jazz, rap, reggae, African praise song, and funeral dirges, among other forms. At the same time, it also distinguishes itself as literary verse— by virtue of its visual layout, self-critique, self-interruption, and semantic complexity. After exploring poetry and song in the work of postcolonial and black British poets such as Jean Binta Breeze and Patience Agbabi, the chapter turns to twenty-first-century American experimental poets such as Rae Armantrout, Michael Palmer, and Tracie Morris, and lyric poets such as Frank Bidart, Kevin Young, Terrance Hayes, and Paul Muldoon.

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.

The multilingualism of postcolonial life-writing brought new attention to how the self is situated within and between wider cultural frameworks not necessarily of one’s choosing, and a much sharper understanding of the relationship between language, identity and power. Yet at the same time, as various critics have been quick to observe, to emphasise non-translatable cultural differences is also to risk commodifying identity in a way that underlines (rather than transforms) historical legacies. This chapter explores the intricate and wide-ranging debates about language and identity that took place in this period between such figures as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kamau Brathwaite, Grace Nichols, Wole Soyinka, Sally Morgan, Michelle Cliff, Daljit Nagra, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

This chapter seeks to discuss a production of “presence” that is not so much a moment of aesthetic intensity as it is a moment of cultural transformation. Such presence may be seen to occur in transcultural encounters, particularly in the reading of cross-cultural literature. Hence the chapter looks to postcolonial poetry in translation to demonstrate how the construct of “transcultural presence,” developed through analysis of reading, proposes a more constructive dialogue, a zone of contact that produces a new cultural space based on the possibility of meaning beyond interpretation. The payoff for such an approach, as this chapter demonstrates, is that “otherness” is encouraged but not captured in the act of interpretative writing.