Nations of Nothing But Poetry

What happens when poets combine vernacular language with the spirit of modernity? Can a poem be cosmopolitanism and vernacular at the same time? Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of Scottish, English, and "Black Atlantic" poetries from the landmark modernist year of 1922 through the mid 1970s. Hart combines discussions of canonical poets, such as T.S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, with chapters on key but lesser known poets noted for their unique and creative introduction of their native vernaculars, like Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, and Melvin B. Tolson. Throughout, Hart puts forward a new interpretation of Anglophone modernist verse that disrupts the literary-critical conflict between "national" and "transnational" poetries. Describing how these poets make "synthetic vernacular" poems out of a disordered medley of formal and linguistic parts, this study explains how poetic modernism is shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of twentieth-century history.