Jahan Ramazani

Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity

Jahan Ramazani is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Virginia. His books include Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001), and the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Twentieth Century and After in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006). modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 445–463.

The Local Poem in a Global Age

Against the current tide of globalization, we posit its opposite, ‘localization.’ . . . Our identity is tied to place: We don’t know who we are unless we know where we are. . . . Rootless, detached people are dangerous. On the other hand, sanity happens when people understand that where they are is who they are. . . . A poetry of place is a poetry which values locales, which sees and lets the reader experience what makes a place unique among places.

Cosmopolitan Sympathies: Poetry of the First Global War

Paul Fussell’s judgment of Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” (1916) as perhaps “the greatest poem of the war,” or at least one of the best, still finds broad assent in Great War scholarship.2 But in one of several departures from Fussell’s groundbreaking book, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), recent criticism has begun to address the global dimensions of a global war—for example, recovering the experience and cultural expression of soldiers from the dominions and colonies, as of observers elsewhere far from the Western Front.3 Rosenberg’s poem reminds us that, for all the traditional emphasis on the English upbringing and values behind much well-known war poetry, even such quintessentially “English” war poems sometimes also have a transnational reach, if we take seriously their “cosmopolitan sympathies.” Not that Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” is representative. Most Great War poetry is either nationalist or panimperial, famously exemplified by Rupert Brooke’s anglicization of earth and heaven in “The Soldier” and John McCrae’s bellicose torch toss in “In Flanders Fields.” Such works demonstrate, if m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty thre e , num b e r four, p p 855–874.