Nations of Nothing But Poetry
Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing
Matthew Hart
Reviews and Awards
"A brilliant illumination of the pathways and crossways of twentieth-century poetry in the Anglophone Atlantic world. Hart redraws the lines of the modernist canon by addressing, with unusual vigor and impressive rigor, poems in which national vernaculars and cosmopolitan languages are constituted in and by each other. Any twentieth-century scholar interested in the progress of transnationalism from buzzword to genuine critical methodology will find this book indispensable and indelible."-Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania
"In productive readings of poems composed in a local but never parochial discourse he calls the 'synthetic vernacular,' Matthew Hart remixes the logics by which we've understood modernism to examine an agitational poetics that is at once regional and transnational, ethnic and postcolonial. A boundary-confounding and generative book."-Dee Morris, University of Iowa
"Nations of Nothing But Poetry is a rich, supple, and capacious book that will become indispensable to any reader of later modernist and postcolonial poetries. Always inventive and often surprising, it weaves its way from Stein to Loy by way of MacDiarmid and Bunting, Brathwaite and Eliot, Mullen and Tolson. Its gifts range from the luminosity of its close readings to the intricate unpicking of the politics of culture and of form. This is a book to be read again and again: it will yield new discoveries on every reading."-David Lloyd, University of Southern California
