Poetry in a Global Age

"Ideas, culture, and capital now flow across national borders with unprecedented ease, but we tend not to think of poems as taking part in this globalization. Jahan Ramazani shows that poetry has much to contribute to understanding literature in an extra-national frame. Indeed, the porousness of world poetry, he argues, stands to radicalize the current transnational turn in the humanities. "Poetry in a Global Age" builds on Ramazani's award-winning "A Transnational Poetics" (2009), a book that had a catalytic effect on literary studies. Ramazani broadens his lens to discuss modern and contemporary poems not only in relation to world literature, war, and questions of orientalism, but also in light of current debates over ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism, and cultural geography. He offers brilliant readings of postcolonial poets like Agha Shahid Ali, Daljit Nagra, and Arun Kolatkar, as well as canonical modernists such as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. We hear, for example, the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison tell of being dislocated by the words of T. S. Eliot, while Eliot's own "Journey of the Magi" alludes to writings from Guadeloupe. Encounters with global poetry, Ramazani shows, inspire poets-and their readers-to "relocalize" themselves in more thoughtful ways"-